Category: tPA 2

Quiet

Every time I look into history I get sucked back farther and farther. I’ve spent the last few days working on my research site, and realizing just how much I don’t know. It took a while to figure out why. It has surprised me to find high school syllabi which cover the same material. I certainly don’t remember anything approaching the sort of depth I see out there now; but back then the courses were “social studies” and “government,” not capital H history as it seems to be today.

After the long hiatus of debauchery that was my “adult” life, I returned to college and thought a moment about majoring in a variety of things: Art History, History, English, and as a last resort, Rhetoric. Funny how things work out. I had to settle on only two, and they ended up being Rhetoric and English, and I couldn’t settle for a minor— no, not me— I had to make it a dual major, thus removing the chance of taking “elective” courses. I figured out that this is why I feel so stupid about American history. I was only able to take two classes: US History to 1877, and an elective upper level course in US History since 1945. The two other required history courses, “History of Western Civilization” were really a waste. When you do a century in an afternoon you can’t possibly remember much.

I have never taken a single class devoted to what I am researching now. It was strange to realize that after five years of school that I know a hundred times more about British history (due to the literature stuff) than I do US history. I’ve only had one course in American literature— American Literature to 1800— so there was little need to study it. Besides, I thought most of it was crap. Because of my single-mindedness in taking over a dozen courses in eighteenth and nineteenth century British literature, I had pretty much ignored the Americans. I suppose this guarantees that my approach will be different. I know where these pesky Americans stole it from.

It’s just the time of year, I guess. I keep thinking about just how much work I really must do to pull this off. I’m really writing about the 1930s in America (as a target focus) but I just can’t get there without dealing with the period from 1877-1945, and I just haven’t been able to cram that into my head in three days. I realized how long it took before the Romantic period really began to make sense to me— and that it only became a focused response when I started studying how the uncertainty of the hundred years that preceded it boiled over in that pivotal period. The same could be said of the 1930s, and it shares much with the 1730s and the 1830s. One of the things the chair of the Rhetoric department is fond of saying is that “all roads lead to the eighteenth century”— I wish he wasn’t right. No matter how much I try to write about the twentieth century, the more I begin to drift back.

There’s always so much more to know. When I feel stupid, I always seem to get quiet. I hope I can find my voice again soon, or this blog will become a very quiet place.

Holiday

I waited and waited for the rain to stop. It didn’t. I finally started carrying my things to the car with an umbrella. Traffic was murder, so I skipped the trip to the bank and hit the freeway. I hate driving on I-40, but because of the possibility of freezing on the mountain roads, I opted to stick to the well-traveled path. And it was well traveled.

Amazingly, the interstate was in better repair than usual. The last time I drove it, traffic was reduced to single lanes for miles in at least six places; this time, it was only three. Unfortunately, I hit the worst of it after dark. Near Clarksville, the road becomes a narrow stripe of concrete bounded by potholed asphalt, which forces you to ride with one wheel on a glassy smooth surface with the other wheel in a ditch. As the ditch fills with water, it’s more like skiing on one side and my car always wants to twist sideways. Of course, there had to be someone right on my ass with his high beams on all the way through.

I took two books with me: William Stott’s Documentary Expression and Thirties America and Documenting America 1935-43. I was in a particularly voracious mood, and read over half of Stott’s book before midnight the first night. The next morning, Christmas Eve, was perfect. A light snow had started to fall at six a.m. and by the time I got up it was coming down smoothly in large flakes. By noon, about four inches of powder was covering everything. It was much more pleasant than the rain. I got on the net to check the weather cams back in Little Rock and saw that it was only falling where I was. Wasn’t that special?

Mom had been baking for days, and decided she wanted a break for Christmas eve. She asked me if I’d go out for pizza. As I crossed the freeway, headed back to Ft. Smith I noticed that though it was snowing, none of it was accumulating on the ground scarcely two miles away. The roads were clear and sparse; the pizza place was having a “no kids” day so it was quiet and nearly empty. The snow continued to fall all day, but while the surrounding landscape looked brown and wet, the area where I was became increasingly beautiful. Just around the corner at the Choctaw casino, I laughed for a moment while I picked up a newspaper for my father. The newspaper vending machine was covered with snow, as it displayed the headline: “No White Christmas for Ft. Smith.”

It dawned on me that it was rapidly becoming a Christmas tradition— pizza on Christmas Eve. For some reason, another thing I connect with Christmas is Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus— I first read it on Christmas day, and I now make it a point to watch Taymor’s film version some time during the holiday season as an antidote to all the “It’s a Wonderful Life” vibe. It was a holiday thrill to have a cherry pie ready to pull out of the oven a few days ago during the penultimate dinner scene, though my companion thought it might be in questionable taste. But I digress, as usual. The sobering thought for Christmas day, as the snow melted away, was that my parents will celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary in March— an achievement, by any standard.

But I ran out of things to read this year— well, almost. Mom suggested that I give a book my father got for Christmas a few years ago a try. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War 1929-1945 is a weighty tome of around 800 pages, and I only managed the first 250 before I came home. I suppose it might seem strange that I often spend holidays reading, but its sort of a family tradition. Though my father doesn’t read as much anymore now that cataracts have impaired his sight, my mother continues to read novels at a constant clip. I suspect that’s where much of my appetite comes from. In our family, the central entertainment was always just sitting around and reading.

The trip back was clear and uneventful, and I’ve got so much work to do. Stott’s book opened up new vistas to explore, including the proletarian fiction of the 1930s. His book (the parts that weren’t merely singing the praises of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) attempts to argue that in the 1930s there was a “documentary impulse” which manifested itself in all the products of that age. There’s so much more to say on that, and I’d like to do a full close reading of the book. But for now, I’d just like to publicly thank you all for reading and hope that your holiday was as nice as mine.