I've come crawling back

The pressures of a blank page...
...weigh particularly heavy when that blank page is the first of 80 that one is expected to produce for a class, for professors whose opinions matter a great deal to me. Those 80 pages (2 separate papers) are now done, my writer's block went away, and an articulate friend nicely pointed out that the blog is my friend. So I've returned. Luckily, blogs can't feel resentment for being scorned. And here's what I've been thinking about (to be developed, hopefully, in future posts):

1. professional ethics. In the first European history class I took in college, taught by a professor to whom I owe my present academic career, said professor once made the off-the-cuff remark that cultural studies is "history without the footnotes." One can learn so much from the digressions of smart people; unfortunately, cultural studies has crept into history, along with the disregard for footnotes (read: empiricism, care for facts, acknowledgment that facts do, in fact, exist). This is to be discouraged.

2. The First World War was really complicated (an understatement loaded with meaning).

3. France is like a giant historical echo-chamber, which makes it really easy to feel self-important when writing its history; people there care about it and leverage it more than in other places. That makes it pretty, and makes writing history more poetic than other subjects allow for.

4. British historians write French history--this might get me in trouble--better than French historians. My explanation might take some of the sting out of that observation. For a British historian to be interested in France usually requires some degree of affection (usually being the operative word--Thomas Carlyle obviously did not feel the love). It's like writing about a crush. French historians aren't so enamored, (again, a generalization that elides over some of the best of them) because they grew up knowing French history differently. Say France was a girl. If you have a crush on her, you see the good, and try to understand the bad, and don't have the psychological approach bred by familiarity to be really damning. If that girl is family, maybe a big sister whose bad habits are intimately known by the observer, one sees different things, and lingers on old, specific, internal questions. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, but it's nicer to read the "you're amazing" version than the "you decapitated my barbie when I was 8 and I'm still kind of angry but I have to like you because you're family" version of events.

5.Israel needs to chill the hell out with its guns.

...more to come.