Sunday, December 9, 2007
Sunday, November 11, 2007
what I've learned
1. Parties advertised as "Sleazy Grad Student Party" actually do contain a number of sleazy grad students. Most of them in finance.
2. It is important to gather the men in one's cohort BEFORE arriving at such a party, as our boys are more protective than they are sleazy.
2. It is important to gather the men in one's cohort BEFORE arriving at such a party, as our boys are more protective than they are sleazy.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
well rested and confused.
When I worked at Oren's, I used to have these terrible dreams in which I'd wake up, open the store, and work for a few hours, and then I'd actually wake up and have to go to work. Those were the worst. It seems that I've traded excruciatingly banal dreams for bizarre ones in switching jobs to student--in the past few weeks, I've had dreams about Hitler in a clown suit getting tackled by a classmate (Ronny) and a rogue band of squirrels, Herodotus making me pancakes in the morning, and the new version of the banal coffee dream, in which I check my email to find that professors have responded to my request for a readings course--this has happened several times. Steve Kotkin, in his dreamed email response, asked how my Russian was, Harold James (whom I didn't ask and have never met) responded that he'd love to run a class, but only if he can shout at us in German the whole time, and Phil Nord just said "no. there are too many cookies to be had." I've had dreams about searching for German nationalism in New Jersey, solving the problem of nationalism in general (it the religious way of thinking, stupid), finding a Russian gulag filled with disney characters (I was pissed when I woke up from that one), and about my dog killing Lenin's cat and how that might have changed history. I wonder if this will taper off at some point, or if I'll have to abandon my evening reading habits.
Sunday, November 4, 2007
research topic!
For the historian of the Twentieth Century, all roads lead back to August, 1914. If the French Revolution represented the best of our origins as the Modern West, The First World War is certainly emblematic of our worst beginnings, when the nineteenth century narrative of progress took a horribly, irreparably wrong turn.
The First World War was a transformative moment in history, a catalyst essential to the understanding of the twentieth century. Taken as a whole, it contrasts so sharply with the nineteenth century, that one forgets the slow trauma it must have involved for those who lived through it. In its naïve beginnings, the irreversible change brought on by WWI appeared rather as a continuation of nineteenth century trends. “Triggered by a nationalist assassination, World War I began as a war of nationalities, igniting the collective passions that had filled the preceding century.” Empires doomed their native sons to battle, and nationalism compelled them to go. Particularly for those on the home front, the horrors of war, and the fundamental break with the past, unfolded as a series of broken expectations, and not as a sudden blow.
The War transformed every part of society in Western Europe, ravaging the home front as dramatically (if by different means) as the wasteland. This conflict left deep psychological scars, and a profound feeling of disorientation in the generations that waged it. The narrative of progress so championed by nineteenth century thought was utterly demolished, leaving empty battle scars in its place. Adding to the chaos, the demographic composition in Europe, which experienced a drop in birthrate even before the war, was intensified by the conflict. According to Eric Hobsbawm’s calculations, “not much more than one in three French soldiers came through the war without harm…The British lost a generation.”
By the end, the full extent of the senselessness and brutality of the war was well known to all involved. “Military servitude had never appeared less noble than it did to the millions of transplanted men, so recently snatched from the moral world of citizenship.” (Furet, Passing of an Illusion, 49) In the face of such futile violence, on such a scale, one would expect feelings of disillusionment about the Great War to permeate cultural production. While still paying homage to the patriots that volunteered to fight and die, or return home maimed, without diminishing their sacrifice, one would expect the war not to be remembered fondly, to take on a new image than that which dominated the propaganda in the warring countries during the conflict. Oddly, this is not always the case.
François Furet rightly notes that, by virtue of the eschatological properties of twentieth century ideologies, a critical sense of contingency (that element that makes history interesting to begin with) has been absent from histories of this short century. Neither religion, nor historical law drive history—action, and ultimately responsibility, rests on the shoulders of human actors in their milieu. Nothing is preordained.
In many ways, the idea of “historical necessity” (another tally on the list of things that are Marx's fault) has obscured the historian’s view of the people who lived through the Great War as people, parents, spouses, instead of as political actors, or potential political actors, or victims of the killing fields in France. Espoused ideology aside, the generation of 1914 had to find ways to return to normalcy after the war, and those with children had to teach them what normalcy was. Narratives of this generation tend to emphasize ideology, or disorientation, themes that rightly dominate post-war studies. Yet, ideology and disorientation are not the dominant themes that were transmitted to the children of this generation about 14-18, the period of upheaval, in France and England, in their literature.
Societal changes wrought by the War have been well studied by historians, but they have largely ignored the children that grew up and came of age in this period, and importantly, the way these massive societal changes were represented to a generation that had never directly known what came before (but would go on to fight the second world war). The Great War was disorienting for adults, but as parents, they were still faced with orienting their children to a world that they themselves didn’t fully understand.
I propose to survey children’s literature produced in France and England in the interwar period in order to better understand the adult worldview as communicated to a younger generation, with specific attention to any commentary on the war, and positionings of self versus other. In Germany, “the private sector” and the media became matters of state interest and, shall we say, influence, especially after 1933;the same can be said of Bolshevik Russia from its inception in 1917. in France and Britain, publishing and "family life" in general remained out of reach of the state. Thus, by nature of the relative freedom of expression granted for more of the interwar period in France and England, I will review books for children produced in those countries. Moreover, while a survey of children’s literature produced in fascist/totalitarian states might make for interesting contrasts, they tend to illuminate more of what one would expect of state interests, and less about what the public at large held as a value. For example, a brief search quickly turned up a book called “The Tale of Red-haired Motele, Mr. Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah and Commissar Bloch,” by Yosif Utkin, written in the USSR in 1933. It is a story of Motele, a Jewish tailor who renounces Judaism to become a Soviet commissar. This book is a striking example of the reaches of Soviet Propaganda, and nothing more.
The scope of my work will be limited to the ways in which adults positioned children in the context of a changing world; in other words, I will focus on the act of narration, which can be factually ascertained by virtue of the books themselves, and not on how children might have interpreted the materials. Though the latter would make for the most interesting study, there are simply no sources readily available for how children understood what they were told. In many ways, researching the child’s worldview is much like reconstructing the mentalitésof the subaltern of a distant past—not something my experience to date has prepared me to do.
In the private sector (contrasted from schooling, with its obvious focus on generating young patriots), children’s stories produced in this period are more akin to those written before the war than with any sort of propaganda, or any reflection of the guilt and resentment that filled adult literature about the war in the same period, in France and Britain. War is mentioned, to be sure, but in a context of a noble fight, and a fresh start after it ended. Are we to assume that the generation of 1914 wished to impart none of the wisdom it had garnered through the long, bloody war, or that literature was an inappropriate place to discuss these lessons, or was didacticism to the young not a component of “never again,” as they saw it?
The facts and meaning of this paradox will be the topic of my first research paper.
The First World War was a transformative moment in history, a catalyst essential to the understanding of the twentieth century. Taken as a whole, it contrasts so sharply with the nineteenth century, that one forgets the slow trauma it must have involved for those who lived through it. In its naïve beginnings, the irreversible change brought on by WWI appeared rather as a continuation of nineteenth century trends. “Triggered by a nationalist assassination, World War I began as a war of nationalities, igniting the collective passions that had filled the preceding century.” Empires doomed their native sons to battle, and nationalism compelled them to go. Particularly for those on the home front, the horrors of war, and the fundamental break with the past, unfolded as a series of broken expectations, and not as a sudden blow.
The War transformed every part of society in Western Europe, ravaging the home front as dramatically (if by different means) as the wasteland. This conflict left deep psychological scars, and a profound feeling of disorientation in the generations that waged it. The narrative of progress so championed by nineteenth century thought was utterly demolished, leaving empty battle scars in its place. Adding to the chaos, the demographic composition in Europe, which experienced a drop in birthrate even before the war, was intensified by the conflict. According to Eric Hobsbawm’s calculations, “not much more than one in three French soldiers came through the war without harm…The British lost a generation.”
By the end, the full extent of the senselessness and brutality of the war was well known to all involved. “Military servitude had never appeared less noble than it did to the millions of transplanted men, so recently snatched from the moral world of citizenship.” (Furet, Passing of an Illusion, 49) In the face of such futile violence, on such a scale, one would expect feelings of disillusionment about the Great War to permeate cultural production. While still paying homage to the patriots that volunteered to fight and die, or return home maimed, without diminishing their sacrifice, one would expect the war not to be remembered fondly, to take on a new image than that which dominated the propaganda in the warring countries during the conflict. Oddly, this is not always the case.
François Furet rightly notes that, by virtue of the eschatological properties of twentieth century ideologies, a critical sense of contingency (that element that makes history interesting to begin with) has been absent from histories of this short century. Neither religion, nor historical law drive history—action, and ultimately responsibility, rests on the shoulders of human actors in their milieu. Nothing is preordained.
In many ways, the idea of “historical necessity” (another tally on the list of things that are Marx's fault) has obscured the historian’s view of the people who lived through the Great War as people, parents, spouses, instead of as political actors, or potential political actors, or victims of the killing fields in France. Espoused ideology aside, the generation of 1914 had to find ways to return to normalcy after the war, and those with children had to teach them what normalcy was. Narratives of this generation tend to emphasize ideology, or disorientation, themes that rightly dominate post-war studies. Yet, ideology and disorientation are not the dominant themes that were transmitted to the children of this generation about 14-18, the period of upheaval, in France and England, in their literature.
Societal changes wrought by the War have been well studied by historians, but they have largely ignored the children that grew up and came of age in this period, and importantly, the way these massive societal changes were represented to a generation that had never directly known what came before (but would go on to fight the second world war). The Great War was disorienting for adults, but as parents, they were still faced with orienting their children to a world that they themselves didn’t fully understand.
I propose to survey children’s literature produced in France and England in the interwar period in order to better understand the adult worldview as communicated to a younger generation, with specific attention to any commentary on the war, and positionings of self versus other. In Germany, “the private sector” and the media became matters of state interest and, shall we say, influence, especially after 1933;the same can be said of Bolshevik Russia from its inception in 1917. in France and Britain, publishing and "family life" in general remained out of reach of the state. Thus, by nature of the relative freedom of expression granted for more of the interwar period in France and England, I will review books for children produced in those countries. Moreover, while a survey of children’s literature produced in fascist/totalitarian states might make for interesting contrasts, they tend to illuminate more of what one would expect of state interests, and less about what the public at large held as a value. For example, a brief search quickly turned up a book called “The Tale of Red-haired Motele, Mr. Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah and Commissar Bloch,” by Yosif Utkin, written in the USSR in 1933. It is a story of Motele, a Jewish tailor who renounces Judaism to become a Soviet commissar. This book is a striking example of the reaches of Soviet Propaganda, and nothing more.
The scope of my work will be limited to the ways in which adults positioned children in the context of a changing world; in other words, I will focus on the act of narration, which can be factually ascertained by virtue of the books themselves, and not on how children might have interpreted the materials. Though the latter would make for the most interesting study, there are simply no sources readily available for how children understood what they were told. In many ways, researching the child’s worldview is much like reconstructing the mentalitésof the subaltern of a distant past—not something my experience to date has prepared me to do.
In the private sector (contrasted from schooling, with its obvious focus on generating young patriots), children’s stories produced in this period are more akin to those written before the war than with any sort of propaganda, or any reflection of the guilt and resentment that filled adult literature about the war in the same period, in France and Britain. War is mentioned, to be sure, but in a context of a noble fight, and a fresh start after it ended. Are we to assume that the generation of 1914 wished to impart none of the wisdom it had garnered through the long, bloody war, or that literature was an inappropriate place to discuss these lessons, or was didacticism to the young not a component of “never again,” as they saw it?
The facts and meaning of this paradox will be the topic of my first research paper.
for discussion
I wish I'd come up with the following myself, but the following quotation is an excerpt from Andrew Sullivan, in the Atlantic Monthly--the full article is well worth reading:
"Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can."
Andrew Sullivan, "Goodbye to All That," in The Atlantic Monthly, December 2007. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama.
I hadn't really considered the international implications of the primaries, but this guy just hit the nail on the head. Even the first female candidate incarnates "politics as usual," both at home and abroad, at a time when the credibility of the country demands a sharp contrast between the last administration and the next.
"Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can."
Andrew Sullivan, "Goodbye to All That," in The Atlantic Monthly, December 2007. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama.
I hadn't really considered the international implications of the primaries, but this guy just hit the nail on the head. Even the first female candidate incarnates "politics as usual," both at home and abroad, at a time when the credibility of the country demands a sharp contrast between the last administration and the next.
Friday, November 2, 2007
they should put me in charge
I have a few thoughts:
1. Affirmative action should be based on family income, and not on race. Poverty makes it difficult to succeed, no matter what skin color people are.
2. Food stamps should only be good for fresh produce and meat. Maybe that would cut down on the obesity epidemic, and give farmers a boost.
3. On immigration: maybe it's all the holocaust stuff I've been reading, but the idea that we can treat a group of people as less than us because they're not conceptualized as part of the nation strikes me as really disturbing. Especially because it seems to be a politically beneficial position to take, particularly the more extreme someone gets. I was watching the democrats (I'm disappointed in all of them) debate the issue of giving "illegal immigrants" (they objected to the term "undocumented workers" because it de-emphasized the crime) drivers licenses in New York. Hillary Clinton took the position that, while she would not have made the same decision, she understood the governor's impulse to issue licenses--the federal government certainly hasn't come up with any viable solutions, and it's better to know who's in the country than to ignore practical solutions to the problem in order to polemicise better. She was attacked from all sides for having a nuanced position (instead of yes or no, which is something the republicans do to the democrats, and the democrats shouldn't do to each other), and because "getting drivers licenses is a privilege that "these people" haven't earned. My god, you'd think we were talking about a gang of rapists. The only crime committed was crossing an imaginary line, to do a lot of shitty work. The politics surrounding the situation are disgusting to watch, and they echo the Nazi tactic of finding an enemy within to rally against and scapegoat. So lay off my people, jerks.
4. I learned something new today: obese people, when they're so far gone as to not fit into the CAT scan machine thingy, which apparently happens more often than is comfortable to think about, get sent to the zoo to use their machine.
1. Affirmative action should be based on family income, and not on race. Poverty makes it difficult to succeed, no matter what skin color people are.
2. Food stamps should only be good for fresh produce and meat. Maybe that would cut down on the obesity epidemic, and give farmers a boost.
3. On immigration: maybe it's all the holocaust stuff I've been reading, but the idea that we can treat a group of people as less than us because they're not conceptualized as part of the nation strikes me as really disturbing. Especially because it seems to be a politically beneficial position to take, particularly the more extreme someone gets. I was watching the democrats (I'm disappointed in all of them) debate the issue of giving "illegal immigrants" (they objected to the term "undocumented workers" because it de-emphasized the crime) drivers licenses in New York. Hillary Clinton took the position that, while she would not have made the same decision, she understood the governor's impulse to issue licenses--the federal government certainly hasn't come up with any viable solutions, and it's better to know who's in the country than to ignore practical solutions to the problem in order to polemicise better. She was attacked from all sides for having a nuanced position (instead of yes or no, which is something the republicans do to the democrats, and the democrats shouldn't do to each other), and because "getting drivers licenses is a privilege that "these people" haven't earned. My god, you'd think we were talking about a gang of rapists. The only crime committed was crossing an imaginary line, to do a lot of shitty work. The politics surrounding the situation are disgusting to watch, and they echo the Nazi tactic of finding an enemy within to rally against and scapegoat. So lay off my people, jerks.
4. I learned something new today: obese people, when they're so far gone as to not fit into the CAT scan machine thingy, which apparently happens more often than is comfortable to think about, get sent to the zoo to use their machine.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
a slight retraction, and thoughts on eugenics
I had dinner with four lovely colleagues a few nights ago, and after instating a "no talking about work" policy, I had a wonderful, non-maddening time. The German in me generally tends to think that rules can solve any problem (if people would only follow them!) but in this case, it worked. So, I like my classmates, I like it here, I just need breaks from work every now and again.
On to eugenics. Many of you will remember that I indulged myself a few months ago and got Nina's DNA tested for breed composition. The results are in...sort of. Of the 38 breeds they test for (listed below), they only found "significant levels (less than 50%)" of rottweiler, and golden retriever "in the mix." So, either Nina comes from a long line of mutts on both sides, or she's mostly a breed of dog that they don't test for. I was hoping for a more extensive list "in the mix," but it is interesting that they found nothing at all else on their list. No shepherd. No dobie. It feels a bit like we've been living with an impostor (golden retriever??).
They only test the breeds most common to the US, so we've decided that Nina's mostly beauceron, confirming our suspicions that she's French. Beaucerons usually get their ears cropped, but au naturalle, the look like this:
You can see it, right?
A list of what Nina isn't:
Afghan Hound,German Shepherd,Akita, German Shorthaired Pointer, Basenji, Golden Retriever, Basset Hound,Greyhounds, Beagle, Italian Greyhound, Belgian Tervuren, Labrador Retriever, Bernese Mountain Dog, Mastiff, Borzoi, Poodle, Boxer, Pug, Bulldog, Rottweiler,Chihuahua,Saluki, Chinese Shar-Pei,Samoyed, Chow Chow, Shetland Sheepdog, Cocker Spaniel, Shih-Tzu, Collie,Miniature Schnauzer, Siberian Husky, Dachshund, St. Bernard, Doberman Pinscher, Whippet, English Setter, Yorkshire Terrier, Border Collie
On to eugenics. Many of you will remember that I indulged myself a few months ago and got Nina's DNA tested for breed composition. The results are in...sort of. Of the 38 breeds they test for (listed below), they only found "significant levels (less than 50%)" of rottweiler, and golden retriever "in the mix." So, either Nina comes from a long line of mutts on both sides, or she's mostly a breed of dog that they don't test for. I was hoping for a more extensive list "in the mix," but it is interesting that they found nothing at all else on their list. No shepherd. No dobie. It feels a bit like we've been living with an impostor (golden retriever??).
They only test the breeds most common to the US, so we've decided that Nina's mostly beauceron, confirming our suspicions that she's French. Beaucerons usually get their ears cropped, but au naturalle, the look like this:You can see it, right?
A list of what Nina isn't:
Afghan Hound,German Shepherd,Akita, German Shorthaired Pointer, Basenji, Golden Retriever, Basset Hound,Greyhounds, Beagle, Italian Greyhound, Belgian Tervuren, Labrador Retriever, Bernese Mountain Dog, Mastiff, Borzoi, Poodle, Boxer, Pug, Bulldog, Rottweiler,Chihuahua,Saluki, Chinese Shar-Pei,Samoyed, Chow Chow, Shetland Sheepdog, Cocker Spaniel, Shih-Tzu, Collie,Miniature Schnauzer, Siberian Husky, Dachshund, St. Bernard, Doberman Pinscher, Whippet, English Setter, Yorkshire Terrier, Border Collie
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
the novelty is wearing off
the deer in the back yard was pretty cool, and seeing bunnies and groundhogs frolic about on a daily basis will probably never get old, but I think I totally underestimated the value of having friends around who aren't colleagues. Sometimes, I don't want to talk about work, or what paper might be due soon, or how much reading there is. These issues slowly become as irritating as the "do I look fat in this outfit" question is to a guy. I'm tired of the anxiety--especially because I'm not anxious about this stuff. People run around like they're curing cancer sometimes, and I'm kind of tired of hearing about this or that inconsequential paper or presentation or article they should have read but didn't. And there's no escape! Tony's out of town, and there's no one unconnected anywhere near me. Nina's been getting an earful.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Omer Bartov, Redux
A friend of mine from Tel Aviv pinpointed what irked me so about Bartov's talk: the complexities of public memory were never addressed. She said she'd wanted to ask him what he thought about there being no public memorials in Israel to the Arabs killed by the Israeli army. If you address the property stolen from the Jews int he 1940s, don't you also have to talk about the displacement of Palestinians in Israel today with the same sense of indignation?
She was working with some kids in Israel, and they did this thing where they brainstormed to think of possible solutions to the issues with Palestine. THey drew up a whole list. Some of their suggestions were deliberately outlandish (let's kill them all!), other proposed solutions were more subtle (limited citizenship under the one state). They voted on a final list, and when all was said and done, they were left, more or less, with the Nuremberg Laws. Food for thought.
She was working with some kids in Israel, and they did this thing where they brainstormed to think of possible solutions to the issues with Palestine. THey drew up a whole list. Some of their suggestions were deliberately outlandish (let's kill them all!), other proposed solutions were more subtle (limited citizenship under the one state). They voted on a final list, and when all was said and done, they were left, more or less, with the Nuremberg Laws. Food for thought.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Empathy and Scholars of Modern Europe
Today, I had class on Fascism and Nazism with the esteemed Professor Rabinbach. In one of our early classes, he chastised (nicely) a fellow student's impulse to kill a bug. He also talked about a colleague of his, another famous historian, who called for "the final solution to the squirrel question" after getting a squirrel infestation in his office; "we must wipe out their eggs!" Today, as an evil cockroach swooped in to terrorize our class, Professor Rabinbach chased it around with a napkin, in order to spare its puny little life and get it out of the room. Actually, he let it run around for a while before it became clear that the rest of us were more concerned with tracing its movements than focusing on discussion. I guess if you spend all your time studying killers, you think twice before squishing the life out of something because the idea of it is inconvenient. I'm impressed.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
omer bartov
I saw Omer Bartov give a talk the other day--it was underwhelming. He was talking about his new book, which, based on what I gathered from the talk, looks at public memory of the second world war in Gallacia (Western Present-day Ukraine) in the form of plaques on buildings, memorials, graveyards, and so forth. His point, over and over, seems to be that the testaments of memory are primarily to "Ukrainian" victims of the war, to the exclusion of Jewish memory. Fair enough, but (and he might do this in the book, I don't know) pointing out lingering traces of antisemitism isn't very interesting unless you explain it, which he didn't. The whole evening progressed like a city tour through that part of the world: I went to Lvuv, and they hid the Jewish past, and then I went to the next town, and they built a shopping mall where the synagogue used to be, and then...
...you get the idea. Lots of accusations, no effort to understand or explain. Needless to say, I won't be buying the book.
The night wasn't a total wash, though. As has often happened to me here at Princeton, I met someone whose work I'm completely in awe of, completely unexpectedly, without going out of my way at all. The post "girlcotting herstory" below, inspired by the book 14-18--one of the authors was there. She was lovely.
...you get the idea. Lots of accusations, no effort to understand or explain. Needless to say, I won't be buying the book.
The night wasn't a total wash, though. As has often happened to me here at Princeton, I met someone whose work I'm completely in awe of, completely unexpectedly, without going out of my way at all. The post "girlcotting herstory" below, inspired by the book 14-18--one of the authors was there. She was lovely.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Nuremberg
Christian Delage just put together an excellent film on the Nuremberg trial, with truly remarkable original footage. It comes out this November. Go rent it. And when you do, answer me this: Why were some of the defendants wearing sunglasses during the trial?
Saturday, September 29, 2007
entitlement
I've decided that being a graduate student at a well respected university entitles me to come out with my list of academic things that I hate, that I think are totally dry and boring and overrated. Before, this might have rendered me low-brow...but I think I've earned it (note: this list comes after a long day of dry reading).
1. Marx: you suck. you were never an historian--you should stay the hell out of my history books!
2. Marxist historians: see above.
3. Military historians--who stood where when really doesn't tell me much.
4. Economic historians--for the same reasons I find Marx boring. And, they're never good writers. If you pick a boring topic, you should write well.
5. Treaties, political history from above: Yawn.
6. It hurts me to say this a little, but Lenin: proletariat this, proletariat that...come on, already. The crafters of the french revolution at least strayed from the party line often enough to say something interesting.
7. Hitler: for someone so creepy, "Mein Kampf" was a real snooze. It took me forever to get offended.
8. Historians of sex: that one's surprising, but I have a good reason. They pick the most tawdry subject, potentially the best read ever, and then muck it all up by spattering the words "normative" and "heteronormative" all over their damn work, with completely scant descriptions of any getting it on. The field is based on the idea that the academy is too prudish for its own good--live up to your complaining!
9. Theorists: when you're supposed to study what people did and thought in their own context, theory, I think, just mucks it up. See: Marx
10. Feminist historians: see Theorists
11. Religious historians: a prerequisite is having reliable reserves of skepticism for sources.
12. Early American history: turns out, puritans were mostly a dull lot. and the people that tend to write about them...man.
Here's my recent list of people who are awesome, off the top of my head:
Eric Hobsbawm (though technically a marxist historian, he certainly doesn't write like one), Francois Furet, Mark Mazower, Robert Darnton, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ian Kershaw, Inga Clandennin, Karen Armstrong, Orlando Figes, Tzvetan Todorov.
1. Marx: you suck. you were never an historian--you should stay the hell out of my history books!
2. Marxist historians: see above.
3. Military historians--who stood where when really doesn't tell me much.
4. Economic historians--for the same reasons I find Marx boring. And, they're never good writers. If you pick a boring topic, you should write well.
5. Treaties, political history from above: Yawn.
6. It hurts me to say this a little, but Lenin: proletariat this, proletariat that...come on, already. The crafters of the french revolution at least strayed from the party line often enough to say something interesting.
7. Hitler: for someone so creepy, "Mein Kampf" was a real snooze. It took me forever to get offended.
8. Historians of sex: that one's surprising, but I have a good reason. They pick the most tawdry subject, potentially the best read ever, and then muck it all up by spattering the words "normative" and "heteronormative" all over their damn work, with completely scant descriptions of any getting it on. The field is based on the idea that the academy is too prudish for its own good--live up to your complaining!
9. Theorists: when you're supposed to study what people did and thought in their own context, theory, I think, just mucks it up. See: Marx
10. Feminist historians: see Theorists
11. Religious historians: a prerequisite is having reliable reserves of skepticism for sources.
12. Early American history: turns out, puritans were mostly a dull lot. and the people that tend to write about them...man.
Here's my recent list of people who are awesome, off the top of my head:
Eric Hobsbawm (though technically a marxist historian, he certainly doesn't write like one), Francois Furet, Mark Mazower, Robert Darnton, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ian Kershaw, Inga Clandennin, Karen Armstrong, Orlando Figes, Tzvetan Todorov.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
my subconscious is misguided, ironic, hypernostalgic, and hungry.
Upon falling asleep "on the job," which is to say while reading a book for class, I dreamed about searching for the mythic origins of German nationalism in the forests of New Jersey. Last night, I had a dream about starting graduate school in the field of history, but during my dream I had the sense that this notion was so far removed from reality as to be absurd, and so I was aware of being asleep while dreaming, though I wish it had occurred to me to contrast the strange dream with "life" (what else could I be doing now?). The night before that, I dreamed about feeling profound nostalgia for living in New York City, which hasn't happened in reality since we moved. Also that night, there was one about making out with Anthony Bourdain, host of a fabulous show on the travel channel, but otherwise much too old for me.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Girlcotting Herstory
During my first semester of college, I took my first real history class, with Dr. Moretta at the University of Houston. He had us read this book, "the best war ever," that, in typical, starry-eyed, freshman-in-college fashion, completely changed my views on academia. Previously, us students had been presented with a narrative, boring and reverent, and apparently set in stone. Here was a book that challenged the party line, while explaining how such exalting views to history come about to begin with, and how that process is, in itself, historical.
I'm reminded of this now, as I'm reading an extraordinarily written history of violence during the first world war, and my old complaints from high school resurface, and I can begin to look back at my academic career and locate a running theme: taboos and popular constructions of history. This (epiphany!) is why I'm so preoccupied with the images of Hitler playing nicely with a dog--that view of Hitler, that his public 'madness' and private persona can at all be separated, is rarely included in standard histories. And yet, it's been there for all to see. What does it say about us that we choose to ignore it?
After World War I, Norbert Elias wrote a book called "the civilizing process," which , whether you've heard of it or not, probably influenced your attitudes towards your ideas of the West. His thesis (and he's not alone) was that the Western world has increasingly turned its back on violence and brutality, thus becoming more civilized, and so forth (he was a sociologist, not an historian). This idea plays nicely with the popular impression that Europe and "the west" is innately suited to democratic organization, and more generally, that history is essentially a story about progress (which itself is an idea that comes at the beginning of what we call modernity, but it's stuck around). I'll leave it to you to debunk Elias' claims, but I will point out that contingency is key, and progress as a thesis only works with an end in mind.
This brings me back to violence as an underexposed factor of human life, particularly in the history books. How can we expect children to understand the importance of this century (apart from homages to victims, which is all well and good, but insufficient) while "shielding" them from the realities of the very wars they study? Obviously, the example of the first world war teaches that simple awareness of the brutality of modern war doesn't necessarily prevent another one from starting. That said, the tendency to sanitize depictions of armed conflicts could only have helped the rush to war in Iraq, to take a prominent contemporary example. I have a friend who went to Iraq, and through my conversations with him, I've been able to experience personally what Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker note as the major impediment in this kind of scholarship in the historian's conscience: how can you pick apart the first-hand accounts of an event that must be absolute hell to live through, without having yourself ever made that kind of sacrifice (note: I'm uncomfortable with use of the word sacrifice, but can't help myself)? This friend of mine called me a few times from Iraq. When I asked what he was doing there, he'd respond with an anecdote about scraping someone's face off of the inside of a car with a shovel, and how that kind of work "sucks." He said it matter-of-factly, after I'd finished telling him about applying to graduate schools. Most of what he described were accounts of cleaning up the aftermath after someone blew themselves up in their cars--I also learned about the heat in Baghdad, and how shady the military can be in assessing the health of their officers (he was told that his coughing up blood regularly was gingivitis, so that the army could keep him posted instead of letting him go get medical help), but never anything personal...there were no accounts of anything he personally did to someone else, no being uncomfortable with the morality of his situation, in other words, no indication of what it might really be like to be there. Maybe he'll spill it in time, but I suspect not. Mostly, I'm sad for my friend, as I suspect he had no idea what he was getting into when he went into the army to begin with, and as a novice historian, I feel more than a little personal responsibility to try to tell more of the truth to more people.
So, current ideas for further research for me include a study of how people retold the story of WWI in the interwar period, to the generation that would grow up to fight in the next war.
Finally, it should be noted that the title for this post has little to do with the content, but it's a tonyism that I'm finding particularly amusing at present.
Otto Dix, Der Krieg 1924, "dead sentry in a trench."
I'm reminded of this now, as I'm reading an extraordinarily written history of violence during the first world war, and my old complaints from high school resurface, and I can begin to look back at my academic career and locate a running theme: taboos and popular constructions of history. This (epiphany!) is why I'm so preoccupied with the images of Hitler playing nicely with a dog--that view of Hitler, that his public 'madness' and private persona can at all be separated, is rarely included in standard histories. And yet, it's been there for all to see. What does it say about us that we choose to ignore it?
After World War I, Norbert Elias wrote a book called "the civilizing process," which , whether you've heard of it or not, probably influenced your attitudes towards your ideas of the West. His thesis (and he's not alone) was that the Western world has increasingly turned its back on violence and brutality, thus becoming more civilized, and so forth (he was a sociologist, not an historian). This idea plays nicely with the popular impression that Europe and "the west" is innately suited to democratic organization, and more generally, that history is essentially a story about progress (which itself is an idea that comes at the beginning of what we call modernity, but it's stuck around). I'll leave it to you to debunk Elias' claims, but I will point out that contingency is key, and progress as a thesis only works with an end in mind.
This brings me back to violence as an underexposed factor of human life, particularly in the history books. How can we expect children to understand the importance of this century (apart from homages to victims, which is all well and good, but insufficient) while "shielding" them from the realities of the very wars they study? Obviously, the example of the first world war teaches that simple awareness of the brutality of modern war doesn't necessarily prevent another one from starting. That said, the tendency to sanitize depictions of armed conflicts could only have helped the rush to war in Iraq, to take a prominent contemporary example. I have a friend who went to Iraq, and through my conversations with him, I've been able to experience personally what Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker note as the major impediment in this kind of scholarship in the historian's conscience: how can you pick apart the first-hand accounts of an event that must be absolute hell to live through, without having yourself ever made that kind of sacrifice (note: I'm uncomfortable with use of the word sacrifice, but can't help myself)? This friend of mine called me a few times from Iraq. When I asked what he was doing there, he'd respond with an anecdote about scraping someone's face off of the inside of a car with a shovel, and how that kind of work "sucks." He said it matter-of-factly, after I'd finished telling him about applying to graduate schools. Most of what he described were accounts of cleaning up the aftermath after someone blew themselves up in their cars--I also learned about the heat in Baghdad, and how shady the military can be in assessing the health of their officers (he was told that his coughing up blood regularly was gingivitis, so that the army could keep him posted instead of letting him go get medical help), but never anything personal...there were no accounts of anything he personally did to someone else, no being uncomfortable with the morality of his situation, in other words, no indication of what it might really be like to be there. Maybe he'll spill it in time, but I suspect not. Mostly, I'm sad for my friend, as I suspect he had no idea what he was getting into when he went into the army to begin with, and as a novice historian, I feel more than a little personal responsibility to try to tell more of the truth to more people.
So, current ideas for further research for me include a study of how people retold the story of WWI in the interwar period, to the generation that would grow up to fight in the next war.
Finally, it should be noted that the title for this post has little to do with the content, but it's a tonyism that I'm finding particularly amusing at present.
Otto Dix, Der Krieg 1924, "dead sentry in a trench."
Sunday, September 16, 2007
geeks are freaks
This morning, in the laundry room, I saw a (stereo)-typical princetonite starching his underwear (white briefs, obviously)and folding all of his clothing into neat stacks of polo shirt-under shirt-starched briefs (who DOES that?)- socks. I wonder if he wears pants.
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Gr(AAAAAAAH!)duate school
I should say this before classes start: I loooove my cohort. There's this great group of girls that just get along great already, and have really made this transition way less scary than it otherwise would have been. It feels like it must be a unique situation. And, I got a macbook, and have been playing with the picture taking thingy.
Saturday, September 8, 2007
new jersey: initial impressions
So, we're mostly settled into our new place. It's actually really nice--we have front and back doors, and only one key for everything (weird), with grass on either side. Nina's loving the extra freedom this affords her--she can hang out in the back by herself and roll around in the grass and stuff (we leave her on the 20 foot leash, and check in every now and then, but there's much less people traffic here than in the city). We have screen door on both ends, so Nina can sit around inside and watch dog tv. There are lots of trees around, so there's a really high squirrel and cat count. On our walk earlier, we saw a bunny hanging out on someone's lawn. And tonight, as if to confirm my analogy that living here was like camping, a buck (big male deer) walked past our unit. It was amazing. Nina and Tony went in for a closer look, and Nina chased it off. It was HUGE.
The night we got in, a classmate of mine and her partner stopped by for a glass of wine. They brought plastic cups and Petit Ecoliers. If trends continue, it might not be so bad here at all.
What I learned during the move:
1. Hiring movers is awesome.
2. Super Wegman's is awesome.
3. Empty apartments that you lived in are depressing, no matter how ready to go you think you are.
4. It's of paramount importance to pack toothbrushes where you can find them.
5. Dogs make stressful situations way better.
6. Chris King reminded me of this, and it's true: almost nothing feels better than passing out on your new floor after a move.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Parting thoughts: effective New York tourism
Really, I've just written this so that Hitler's not the first thing people see when looking at my blog...
1. Eat Pizza from a non-chain pizza place: It makes no sense to visit the city and blow all your money on a 5 star meal--fancy food can be bought (almost) anywhere, but the foods that New York is famous for, it turns out, are actually unique to the place. There's nothing like a New York pizza--every New Yorker has a favorite slice. Mine happens to be Sal and Carmine's on Broadway at 102nd street--my first and favorite taste of NYC pizza.
2.Don't waste your time in stores (except for H&M, which is worth a detour). Go see the parks, and pick up coffee while you're at it. No trip to the city is complete without an afternoon in central park (from which you can get cool cityscapes from the heart of the beast). Washington square has some of the best people watching in the world. Riverside park is a good place to see inhabitants making good use of public space.
3. Walk through times square, but do it at night, and leave promptly.
4. Take the subways, they don't bite.
1. Eat Pizza from a non-chain pizza place: It makes no sense to visit the city and blow all your money on a 5 star meal--fancy food can be bought (almost) anywhere, but the foods that New York is famous for, it turns out, are actually unique to the place. There's nothing like a New York pizza--every New Yorker has a favorite slice. Mine happens to be Sal and Carmine's on Broadway at 102nd street--my first and favorite taste of NYC pizza.
2.Don't waste your time in stores (except for H&M, which is worth a detour). Go see the parks, and pick up coffee while you're at it. No trip to the city is complete without an afternoon in central park (from which you can get cool cityscapes from the heart of the beast). Washington square has some of the best people watching in the world. Riverside park is a good place to see inhabitants making good use of public space.
3. Walk through times square, but do it at night, and leave promptly.
4. Take the subways, they don't bite.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Hitler should have been a cat owner.
(photo by Walter Frentz)
The carnage of the twentieth century, unprecedented in scale and graphic availability to the civilian, has taught my generation much about the ubiquity of evil. My generation, I say, because we haven't been heavily involved in any major wars, and even the photos and footage we've been shown of 9/11 were heavy on the spectacle of falling buildings and light on actual carnage and casualties. Not having been able to follow the rise to power of those who we now recognize as evil, it's been easier for our history books to paint figures like Hitler into vicious little caricatures of themselves, less human and more nightmarish than he realistically could have been.
This is important because when people my age look for evil today, we seem to have stopped looking at people who seem ordinary-ish, and search for the "bad guy" caricature that we've been supplied with. Conversely, when one has been given the label of 'evil,' we stop thinking of them as rational people, stop listening to what they have been saying, and discount them as bad or mad entirely. (Bin Laden is a good example of how this has worked)
So, in the interest of full disclosure, I think it's important for you to know, dear readers, that Hitler loved puppies. Capable of such callous carnage in his public life, and such empathy for animals, dogs in particular, in private. He found a mutt in the trenches during World War I, named it Fuchsl, and was distraught when he was stolen. Later, he received Blondi, an Alsatian, as a gift. In the 1930s, he instituted animal protection laws that afforded animals more rights than anywhere else at the time--this included a ban on using dogs to hunt, as Hitler considered it "unsporting." In political life, good treatment of animals became tied to good citizenship; for example, Goering once said, "Whoever tortures animals violates the instincts of the German people." Regardless of how the reforms were sold to the people, this concern with the ethics of treatment of animals surpasses that of our own time and place. The hunting laws instituted in Nazi Germany--which, I believe, remain in place--aim to combat unnecessary suffering in the hunted. We, stuck in the second-amendment-issues of such regulation, afford our critters much less compassion. That bears repeating: regarding animal cruelty, our society is notably less compassionate than Nazi Germany was...in this one respect, Hitler has the moral high ground. It boggles the mind.
(Fuchsl next to Hitler)
I'm convinced that there's more to learn from this, but I'm not sure what it is. As one who spends a lot of time with dogs and dog owners, I've concluded that one can learn a lot of a person based on the kind of pet they choose, and what breeds they're drawn to. Personally, I find that the more compassionate of us opt for pound mutts. But it can't be just a coincidence that Bob Dole is drawn to miniature schnauzers while the Clintons had a lab. Napoleon's wife had a pug, Marie Antoinette had cats. Lenin had a cat, too, and I think Stalin had a pet tarantula. This all seems appropriate, but I can't put my finger on why, exactly. Back to Hitler, and his beloved mutt. Perhaps it's just another drop in the bucket of examples of the banality of evil, but the image is hard to get past.
(photo by Walter Frentz)
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
59 degrees farenheit, with light rain and thick fog
It's rainy and cold today, an anomaly for August, but much what it was like outside when first I came to this great city. I remember the gaudy "welcome to the big apple" sign at LaGuardia; now I roll my eyes at it, then it actually meant something important to me. The smell outside of baggage claim, the smell of a new city, dark, mysterious, disorienting. I can't smell that anymore. I was 18 at the time, in hot pursuit of an ill-fated romance (I'd call it a trainwreck in retrospect, but at the time, it was a lot of fun, like in the movies). The cab drove with typical bravado through slippery October highways, past the prominent "History channel" billboard, to the Hayden Hall hotel, on 79th and Columbus. The smells of that place linger with me as well--smoky, cheap rooms, with overtones of lavender air freshener. It was a crappy place, as close to the kind of hotel room where detectives on Law and Order find cold bodies as the Upper West Side can manage, but I paid for it myself, and to me it represented my first tentative steps towards independence.
That first night, I met the 1/9 train, saw times square at night for the first time (impressive, not annoying--now I avoid that area like the plague), and then went directly to a coffee shop in greewich village, Esperanto's. You could smoke inside back then. In the ladies room, someone had scrawled "For Ophelia, for we are also what we have lost" on the defunct hand dryer. I had a chai. I'd love to be able to remember what Michael and I talked about that night, but it's a blur.
That was 5 years ago, and in that time, I feel that I've really grown up in the city. It's difficult to recapture the excitement of being on the precipice of a decision that I knew would affect the rest of my life, but sometimes, on days like today, I can walk along 81st street, in front of the planetarium, or though West 4th, where the other important cafe of my past no longer exists, and remember the beauty of being new to New York City.
That first night, I met the 1/9 train, saw times square at night for the first time (impressive, not annoying--now I avoid that area like the plague), and then went directly to a coffee shop in greewich village, Esperanto's. You could smoke inside back then. In the ladies room, someone had scrawled "For Ophelia, for we are also what we have lost" on the defunct hand dryer. I had a chai. I'd love to be able to remember what Michael and I talked about that night, but it's a blur.
That was 5 years ago, and in that time, I feel that I've really grown up in the city. It's difficult to recapture the excitement of being on the precipice of a decision that I knew would affect the rest of my life, but sometimes, on days like today, I can walk along 81st street, in front of the planetarium, or though West 4th, where the other important cafe of my past no longer exists, and remember the beauty of being new to New York City.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
reading lists
Last summer, President Bush announced that he was reading "The Stranger" by Camus--what a perfect choice, I thought--either he's an idiot, and the irony is sickening, or he's not, and his cynicism blows me away. What a tidy metaphor for the larger debate surrounding this man. Similarly, Clinton, when asked what his favorite book is, couldn't settle on one, and came up with a list. Imagine my glee when Mitt Romney, a MORMON contender for the republican nomination for president in 2008, was asked what his favorite book is. Mormon, to me, already indicates a serious lapse in sanity. Intolerant, you say? Go look up what these people decide to believe. Do it. They're willfully irrational. Anyway, his answer was that the bible is his favorite book (trite, trite), BUT that L. Ron Hubbard's "Battlefield Earth" is his favorite novel. (L. Ron Hubbard being the founder of Scientology, a cult that asks its adherents to believe that traumatic memories stem from tiny bits of alien that exploded way back when and became attached to humans. really.) How perfect is that?
Monday, July 16, 2007
I want to stay in New York forever.
I was talking with a friend the other day, and he observed that he'd always been drawn to history as a result of having grown up around the Hudson River area. As I walked home, uphill from where we were, I took note of my surroundings in a new light. I live about a quarter mile east of the Hudson River, and roughly an eight of a mile west of a cliff that overlooks spanish Harlem. Additionally, starting in my neighborhood heading north, the height above sea level rises pretty steadily, until you get to the part of town called Washington Heights, which got its name from being the highest (natural) point on Manhattan, and as such was the spot that General Washington chose to be his lookout area, so he could see enemy ships approaching from the south, on either part of the island, from the Forth they built ("Fort Wahington;" they lost the battle anyway). I went up to my roof and looked down Broadway, that famous wide avenue that was designed to be "broad" enough to heard cattle down once upon a time. It was a cattle trail. Before that, it was an Indian trail, obviously unpaved, but still carved out of the natural vegetation that once covered Manhattan island.
New York, and, I suspect, many other cities that were designed before cars became big, lends its inhabitants the opportunity to, in the course of the day, look at the landscape and imagine, vividly, what it must have looked like 100+ years ago. Without going out of my way at all, I can look at the Hudson River, with its rocky edges and its surrounding forests, and imagine, without too much trouble, really, what it might have looked like before New Amsterdam was settled. The many cliffs and contours of northern Manhattan can sometimes, if you squint, give an idea of how the city looked before pavement.
You don't get this kind of connection to years past in the landscape where I grew up. We had freeways, and the Alamo, and not much in the way to suggest a special connection to the land that drew people to Houston, or San Antonio, for decades. Houston was built on a swamp, but all we have around us to really evoke that kind of past are the mosquitoes--a far less romantic reminder, by the way, than rivers and forests, and old, wide streets, and cobblestone downtown, etc. In Texas, if you want history, you drive through downtown San Antonio to the facade of the Alamo, try to find an unmetered parking space, give up and park across the street for, like 50 cents an hour, which you will complain about the duration of your tour. The Alamo doesn't look old, or lived-in. It looks more like the kind of place that Ozzy might pee on, and less like the kind of place that we are to imagine (and there are SO many problems with the story, but let's go with it for now) that "heroes" (I can't resist the quotations. sorry.) "bravely" defended their "principles" and martyred themselves. You walk in, and there's stuff in glass cases. To the left, I think, is the gift shop. That's it. If not the Alamo, we have the San Jacinto monument somewhere outside of Houston, where the highlight of my trip was that machine they had, that pressed pennies into flat San Jac icons. Nothing about driving through the streets of Houston evokes anything beyond perhaps personal nostalgia. Nothing.
New York, and, I suspect, many other cities that were designed before cars became big, lends its inhabitants the opportunity to, in the course of the day, look at the landscape and imagine, vividly, what it must have looked like 100+ years ago. Without going out of my way at all, I can look at the Hudson River, with its rocky edges and its surrounding forests, and imagine, without too much trouble, really, what it might have looked like before New Amsterdam was settled. The many cliffs and contours of northern Manhattan can sometimes, if you squint, give an idea of how the city looked before pavement.
You don't get this kind of connection to years past in the landscape where I grew up. We had freeways, and the Alamo, and not much in the way to suggest a special connection to the land that drew people to Houston, or San Antonio, for decades. Houston was built on a swamp, but all we have around us to really evoke that kind of past are the mosquitoes--a far less romantic reminder, by the way, than rivers and forests, and old, wide streets, and cobblestone downtown, etc. In Texas, if you want history, you drive through downtown San Antonio to the facade of the Alamo, try to find an unmetered parking space, give up and park across the street for, like 50 cents an hour, which you will complain about the duration of your tour. The Alamo doesn't look old, or lived-in. It looks more like the kind of place that Ozzy might pee on, and less like the kind of place that we are to imagine (and there are SO many problems with the story, but let's go with it for now) that "heroes" (I can't resist the quotations. sorry.) "bravely" defended their "principles" and martyred themselves. You walk in, and there's stuff in glass cases. To the left, I think, is the gift shop. That's it. If not the Alamo, we have the San Jacinto monument somewhere outside of Houston, where the highlight of my trip was that machine they had, that pressed pennies into flat San Jac icons. Nothing about driving through the streets of Houston evokes anything beyond perhaps personal nostalgia. Nothing.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
a misadventure
This blog was started on a truly selfless impulse: to help a friend choose a template for her blog. I had to pretend to create one to make an educated suggestion. And the temptation of an empty slate got the best of me, so here I am. The name I chose just came to me, and I thought it was hilarious, though if I'd known I'd be making a decision that would be in effect for more than a few minutes, and more public than just for me, I might have chosen more wisely. I also would have given more careful consideration to whether there ought to have been two l's in "sacrilicious" (sacrillicious?).
This entry might be all I ever get around to writing here. Perhaps not. I'd like to have a go at this blogging thing, though, apart from my feeble attempts on myspace, which location, I think, immediately saps the gravitas of my varied opinions. Stay tuned.
This entry might be all I ever get around to writing here. Perhaps not. I'd like to have a go at this blogging thing, though, apart from my feeble attempts on myspace, which location, I think, immediately saps the gravitas of my varied opinions. Stay tuned.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
