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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.