Paper topics and me. Daily experiences in alienation

Tonight in class we had to go around the room and give a two minute little thing about what our paper topics for the class are. Everyone was going, and they all had these topics I would never have thought of doing, but which sounded so simple and right for the kind of class this is. I’m stressing about how I’m going to explain my topic. My turn comes I get up there and this is roughly what I say. “I’m writing um about the digital archive…….. and um how historians will, um, you know, um doing historical stuff with it……. it’s really theoretical, and um, it’s about historians and epistemology, um, i mean truth, no um well maybe contexts, and um, and space and…… um the way that you know, um, provenance is affected. Um, yeah that’s what I’m writing on.”
I’m so fucking stupid. I can’t say I was embarrassed, just dumbstruck at what the fuck is wrong with me. Instead of just coming up with some archive and writing a little paper about what they are doing, and why something or other is interesting, I have to think that a good topic would be the role of the historian in an archive and the epistemological ramifications of meeting the past as an other through the archive, and running this up against what exactly is meant by the archive and the moving of something from the private sphere into the public.

Whose brain works like that? What inspired me to mash up a small part of Derrida into Levinas, and then want to top it off some with Benjamin (which isn’t even in this toned down ‘thesis’), and then run it all through a critique of instrumental reason and the culture industry? Because god fucking forbid I leave Adorno and Horkheimer out of my mental masturbation. What is it that stops me from thinking like a normal person, maybe keeping these thoughts safely tucked away in my head for when I feel like playing philosophical games with myself, and do something that isn’t trying to smash everything apart with theory? I’m an idiot.

A bookfair and I say the word cool a lot.

I hate that I have only ever updated this stupid blog when it was required for class.  I guess maybe goodreads.com works as my outlet for ‘public’ writing, but I still think I should be able to maintain keeping this updated without having to be coaxed into doing it by some extra points towards a grade.

Today I went to a bookfair for small and independent publishers.  I gave money to some Canadians and got some books from them in return, I wanted to give money to more Canadians in exchange for books, but I ended up giving it to some guy wearing chipped black nail polish for a second small stack of books.  So many beautiful looking books at some of the tables, books I’d never seen before and who were asking to come home with me.  If I had the money they all would have followed me home.

On the awkward side I feared everytime someone talked to me there.  A elderly gay man tried to push his awfully looking self-published book on me, the price was so low that it felt really wrong to tell him no.  He told me his father was on the cover.  I said cool.  The elderly lesbian standing next to him told me I could have her book too, it also looked awful and self-published.  She said it was about 1950’s New York and musical theatre and it was a murder mystery.  The third man with them chimed in I could have his book for five dollars too, all of their books for only 15 dollars.  The woman told me her book was available on amazon, but it was cheaper her today.  I said cool, and got away from the table.  Later a man handed me a flier for his political book company.  I said thank you, he then pointed out that they were books about the economy and it’s present state, and I told him that’s really cool.  I felt stupid, but I told lots of people I whose stuff I wasn’t interested in today that it was cool.

Special Olympics for ‘readers’

I have held Paulo Coleho readers as a special breed of imbicile, and I’ve held them to a standard to guage all others to.  Lately though I’ve begun to wonder if this is fair.  Is it right to be so judgmental against someone just because of who they read?  And is it right to think that these feel good, can’t deal with reality new age bullshit types who don’t know the alphabet are really the epitome of dumb?  I don’t know the answer to this, although I have to admit that it might be the Nicholas Sparks fans who should be rightfully holding the moron crown, or should it really be placed on the pointy little pinheads of James Patterson readers?  In the first two cases the books can be difficult to see since they are on the bottom shelf, it can be difficult to know that those books on the bottom shelf are continuations of the alphabet and not just some crazy shit.  But in the case of Mr. Patterson’s readers he gets a whopping three shelves to fill up with all of the little books he forces some other writer to write for him, meaning it’s difficult to miss them.

I don’t know if I will ever know the answer to who of this trinity can lay claim to having the dumbest reader base.  I will one day hopefully come up with suitable science to figure it out, but until then I can only imagine who in fact has the most clueless readers.

1985

1985

by Anthony Burgess

Some books age well, some don’t. Some books make prophesies of the future and they are wrong. Sometimes even when they are wrong they are still considered correct and are their jargon enter into the general lexicon as in 1984. Other books miss the mark of being correct about the future but they disappear from the world, as in the case of 1985.

I came across a reference to this book while thumbing through a biography on Anthony Burgess about five years ago. Since then I have kept my eyes opened looking in used book stores and those kinds of places for a copy of the book. I could have probably found the book to buy online, but I rarely ever do that kind of thing for myself. Last week though in a semi-ironic act I actually went to a library and saw that they had the book, so I took it out and finally got the read it.

The structure of the book is a little weird. The first hundred pages are a collection of essays and a faux-interview with the author on George Orwell’s much misused utopian novel. The gist of the first hundred pages is that Orwell’s book was grossly misunderstood by many and that it’s really a bleak picture of London in 1948 and also at heart a comic novel. It’s also according to Burgess the culmination and defeat of a lifetime of a conflicting belief in the working class by Orwell. After getting through this part of the book is a novella by Burgess where he presents his own possible future for England, one which he sees I’m sure as equally comical but also also a little less naive to the state of the world (why Orwell’s naivety is difficult to explain here). Basically Burgess’ version of a horrible future is taken from the idea that the bombs never did end up falling that everyone thought would in the post-war era, and instead of bombs there were even greater horrors to the killing of humanity present.

Burgess wrote his book in the late 1970’s. The book came out in 1978, a time when England was in a lot of trouble. Wide-spread unemployment, striking unions, inflation and general civil-unrest were present. This is the stage that would bring Thatcher and Reagen to prominence, and their own anti-labor acts would put a stop the basic premise of Burgess book, but that was still in the future.

Burgess saw a world destroyed by the power of unions, where strikes were a common thing and they were always held for more money-something that was quickly losing it’s value. In Burgess world everyone went on strike, firemen, the army, chocolate makers, train-operators, anyone you can think of. And if a building burned down, it was the fault of someone who didn’t give into the strike. It’s kind of a conservative horror show here, but there is still something subversive underlaying Burgess story. More than just the awfulness of syndicalism, Burgess also saw a general dumbing down of the culture taken beyond being just the norm but to the regulated norm. Language decided upon the majority usage, if most people misuse words then the misuse must be correct etc., (he called this Workers English, and he saw it as something even worse than Newspeak, or Doublespeak). He also saw a bleak pragmatic future where culture was left behind because it had no market value. As a result only the hooligans, or maybe droogs and the old resistors to the new world knew things like Latin or Greek, or the works of Plato and Shakespeare, or cared about history.

The book has something reactionary about it, and it is certainly an elitists nightmare of a possible future but it’s also a warning cry against the leveling a dumbed down consumerist culture could possibly create. Some of the premises of the book have essentially been destroyed by the actions of Thatcher and Regan in the early 80’s but there is still something to be read in this forgotten book.

Because I’m dumb…

I never thought of the idea that printing up this blog to hand in some of the entries for class would be difficult with an all black background. Oppps. I’ll be changing the background at some point temporarily for my own ease of printing, and then putting it back to black again or maybe a very vile color. Who can say for sure.