Category: Nerdiness

Bibliographies, Indices, Card Catalogues, oh my!; or, The Well-Organized Life: A Cry for Help

I have always been interested in the meticulous organization of my thoughts and scribblings. Back in my childhood bedroom, my notebooks are shelved in chronological order; my high-school math notes are in a three-ring binder with tabs for “geometry” and “intermediate algebra” and “pre-calculus” and “calculus”; the boxes of schoolwork are indexed by academic year and subject; the hard drives are the same, with nests of folders backed up in three places all cross-indexed by date and subject.

But if my work has always been organized, my thoughts have not. My notebooks may march on, all neatly dated in the top right-hand corner of each page, but if I don’t know when I scribbled down a certain quotation or an idea for a new line of research or the title of an article to read, how am I ever going to find it again? In all my efforts to reorganize—blogs, varying folder trees, the occasional catch-all manila envelope—I never seem to have broken out of a chronological approach. It is all very well to scribble a date on something and consider it filed, to post it to a WordPress CMS and see it “archived,” but that’s not much of a card catalogue at all. Even if I started using tags on my blogged collections of pensées, that wouldn’t solve the problem of my handwritten notes, my scribblings in the margins of books, my books themselves. It’s been a long time since I had so few books that I could keep track of them all in a database without constant management—and now that I’ve taken to writing notes about everything in them, that’s become even more true. It’s begun to seem like an insurmountable question of organization—and given that I have officially started background-reading for The Big Research Project, this is a terrible time for me to realize that my research methods are simply inadequate.

I was put in mind of this problem when reading Keith Thomas’s fantastically engaging meditations on scholars’ research methods in this week’s London Review of Books. Thomas talks about moving beyond scribbles in the margins of books (I give a nervous glance in the direction of my weighty used hardcover edition of the Ellmann Wilde biography, which is becoming covered in pencil as I haul it up and down the northeast corridor); he goes on to catalogue catalogues—and commonplace books, card indices, slips of paper in pigeonholes, eventually arriving at cursory (and dismissive) references to the various methods of electronically managing lots of little bits of information. And as I read the article, it slowly dawned on me that: 1) Thomas was speaking from the experience of having written his own long works of history; 2) I will before too long be writing my own long works of history, commencing with The Big Research Project (okay, I mean my senior thesis, but I’m too embarrassed-slash-pretentious-slash-I-read-too-many-real-academics’-blogs to actually call it what it is); 3) I will need more than half a dozen books with attendant scribblings to do this; 4) A year or more from now when I actually start writing the damn thing, I will probably not remember to the letter everything I was thinking when I first read the first sources back in the summer of 2010. Radical revisionism, I concluded, would be required.

And then, of course, two days went by, and I made another hundred pages’ worth of notes in my Wilde books, bookmarked another half-dozen journal articles and book reviews suggesting further avenues of research, and made a couple new entries in my journal trying out some language for thesis statements—all according to the old chronological, scribblings-in-margins method, and all very difficult to recoup without doing all the work I’m doing now over again.

My background reading is going well; I’m in high spirits and I feel as if I’m getting somewhere. Last night I began to get a sense of just where this project might slot between the work that real historians have done, and found myself overcome by the heady enthusiasm that I find invariably greets the all-too-rare sense that I am Having Original Thoughts. Of course, in the background there is always the fear that tomorrow I am going to notice the article which has said everything I could ever possibly want to say, put forth all the primary sources I could ever hope to discover, and in every way trampled over the ground onto which I dream of stepping far better than any half-baked undergrad who took a few seminars at Princeton and now thinks she knows everything could manage. But right now I am scribbling down titles to order the minute I have a permanent address and lying in bed at night dreaming up chapter titles as blithely as can be—only hoping that, as my mental database grows larger, I don’t forget the pieces of my argument which I’m holding mentally—I’m sure, after all, to misplace the bits of paper.

Dear reader, I think it’s time for a Cry of Help: what methods do you propose for keeping together thoughts both in direct response to texts and removed from them; citations; potential avenues of inquiry; and other such necessary trappings of my scary first big project? I prefer analog methods to digital ones, but if there’s a particular computer notetaking/filing strategy you swear by, let me know that too. There is nothing I want more in my life right now than to pull off this project and feel myself worthy of graduate study… but right now it feels very large, and I feel very small indeed, and all those little bits of paper covered in pencil seem like a Red Sea in need of parting.

Summer Reading; or, The Time a Young Woman’s Fancy Turns to BOOKS!

This is it: my belongings are all packed in boxes and sent off to storage; I’ll be moving out of my dorm room—my home for the past nine months—tomorrow afternoon. This means it’s summer, the time of weather worth sitting outside for, of long rides on trains and airplanes, of parks and beaches and unscheduled blocks of time. It’s time for summer reading, and so I thought I’d share with you the books which I am hoping to read this summer. It’s a long list, comprising some books which I am reading for pleasure, some which I am reading for thesis research, and some which I am reading for a sort of academic club of which I’m a member. I’m sure I won’t get to all of them—the summer, after all, is a time for not stressing overmuch about deadlines—but I will certainly be reading voraciously and constantly. The list, in alphabetical order:

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Willa Cather, The Professor’s House
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That
Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography
Arthur Rimbaud, ed. and trans. Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock, Selected Poems and Letters
Douglas Shand-Tucci, The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture*
Edmund White, everything I haven’t read yet (I’m currently reading The Married Man)
Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann, The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Feel free to read along with me, to offer your own recommendations, and in general to join me in enjoying the wonders of SUMMER!

[* The reviewers agree that Shand-Tucci’s approach is not a historically rigorous nor necessarily accurate one, but I’m reading the book for background information and direction more than for facts. I’m hoping it will give me names, anecdotes, etc. that I can pursue and fact-check and therefore an understanding of what was distinctively American about a university that thought itself the U.S. equivalent of Oxbridge.]

Looking Back, Looking Ahead; or, The First of What Will No Doubt Become Many Posts In Which I Note That I Am Halfway Through College

Tonight, I took a break from writing my final papers (all five of them) in order to play the guitar. I found a couple websites with chords for some of the songs that were most important to me when I was 12 and 13, a lifetime ago: Child ballads, sea shanties, the liberation-themed drinking songs of the Jacobite rebellions. I know these songs well enough that I’m not just limited to strumming rhythmically—I can sing the complicated alto and tenor melodies in tune and audibly, and sing them I did, alone in my room to myself. Visions flashed before my eyes: listening to Silly Wizard sing Jacobite songs on my old CD player that skipped in time to the bumps in the road when I sat in the very back of the school bus the year I lived in Massachusetts. Buying the two-disc Pentangle album Light Flight in a department store in London, then the lengths my mom went to in ordering a replacement from overseas when our car was broken into and the first copy was stolen. The sea shanties I sang as my sister and I spun and danced through the grass in my grandparents’ backyard in Canada. The fictional characters whose lives sprang out of these songs like holograms out of a projector, and who became more real to me and more constant companions in my life than any of the kids my age into whose social lives I had such difficulty integrating. Those were the days when I read for pleasure—trashy Celtic romance novels and Robert Louis Stevenson. Those were the days when I wrote fiction. Those were the days when my teachers gave up correcting my stubbornly British spellings; the days when I’d wear a dress one day and a doublet and knee-breeches the next. And dear god, how I miss those days, when the dress code was strictly 18th-century and I didn’t have to worry about sex or love or how to pay the bills. When I helped my classmates with their Latin translations or their math homework and didn’t have to worry whether I was good enough for grad school. When, if I ever needed a way out, there was a book or a song or a costume drama to provide it.

The last time I was in England it was 2003, right at the peak of this faraway long-lost Anglophilic child’s paradise, and so naturally as I begin to make my plans for next academic year—when I’ll be spending six or seven months in the mother country—I find my thoughts turning there again. Now a cynical 20-year-old with one ear turned towards politics and another towards cultural history, I feel as if I have a more realistic sense of what England means now than I did seven years ago, when I imagined it as a land of Sassenachs somewhere between the Child ballads and Monty Python. And yet the more I learn about Oxford, and about what it will be like to be a student there for six months, the more I find myself invested in a fantasy of Oxford that I not only can’t wait to find in England, I seek to create wherever I am. Oxford means monastic scholarship, and having all the time in the world to do the work you need to do; it means lingering over dining-hall meals; it means long walks in the sunshine and punting on the river; it means beer in dimly-lit pubs. Aside from the constraints of the U.S. drinking age, springtime in Princeton is always, I believe, a chance to make it become fantasy-Oxford: I sprawl on the grass and read in the sunshine; I keep reasonable hours and make steady progress writing essays in the library; I linger at the dinner table, in my friends’ rooms, in my professors’ offices, in the hopes (usually fulfilled) that someone will say something interesting. And I try to put away my fears of the future—whether that’s how the hell I’m going to manage the logistics of putting my life in boxes for the summer, or how I’m going to find a direction in which to take my thesis research, or what I will do with my life in two years with a bachelor’s degree behind me. These are the ugly things—and I have no intention of letting them intrude on my Part-I-of-Brideshead-Revisited idyll. Come a week from Monday, I will have only two years left of university—and if your university career doesn’t look like Arcadia, I mean, what’s the point?

I jest, of course. But Anglophilia past, present, and future reminds me how uneasy I have always been with living entirely in the real world, and how comforting and inner-light-bringing I find my fantasy lives to be when I am far away from the people and the places I call home. When I was little, I wrote my imaginary friends into the routines of my life; so, too, when I bounce from coast to coast and country to country this summer, and move to another country for half of next year, will I imagine that my biological and Princeton families are there with me.

Two decades, half a college education, and still I am so frighteningly far from either understanding myself or being the person I want to be. Still I come away from those conversations where I linger and curse myself for my ignorance or my rhetorical clumsiness, wondering why anyone wants to spend time with a dork like me. And I suppose it is—and always will be, as it always has been—in the life that blossoms alone, late at night in some bedroom I call home, that all that insecurity matters naught, that my imaginary friends reassure me that I have the panache I crave, and that I can still be a scholar—even if on the inside I never grow out of being a dorky mixed-up 12-year-old.

On the Influential Books Meme; or, Reading Memoirs

I would like to begin by pointing out the pun in the phrase “Reading Memoirs,” and then point you to Alyssa Rosenberg’s great take on the blogosphere’s recent “influential books” meme, in the new Atlantic culture section. Alyssa presents her titles not as a list but as a chronology, a life history, and I appreciate this: it demonstrates the organic way that texts influence us, and that the life—and not the texts—are the organizing factor here. We don’t live our lives in accordance with a literary canon; rather, we fixate on certain texts that seem to speak most directly to us at different points in our lives. Unlike some of my colleagues, I hesitated to compile a list, because I’m not sure if I’ve analyzed the past twenty years to a point where I could come up with a good understanding of which texts are the closest reflections of me at given, so to speak, historical moments. I would glance at my bookshelf, my eyes would light upon a text—like Ginsberg’s “Howl,” or Chauncey’s Gay New York, and I would subsequently realize what little the texts that form the core of my literary personality now have to do with the sort of prelapsarian state of my intensely literary, inward-looking, shy, antisocial, alternately self-proclaiming and self-doubting childhood.

One of the biggest themes this academic year in my self-psychoanalysis has been revisiting a world I very much feel as if I left behind when I entered high school. I’ve spoken on this blog before—particularly last fall—about seeking to reclaim that particular romanticized-childhood version of myself, and only now coming to understand my first decade or so as highly relevant to my second. Last fall, for a class on biography and autobiography, in which we read many memoirs, I wrote a reading memoir about my first decade, and the degree to which it was shaped (in ways both within and outside of my control) by books. This spring, I am taking a class on children’s literature, revisiting other books which I haven’t touched since my fall from childhood innocence. I’ve dealt a lot with Alice in Wonderland in both these classes and in my own cogitations—it was the book that, as I wrote in my memoir, provoked my first visit to a university library, but it wasn’t until I read it again in one of the many times I’ve done so this year that I realized that the fact that Alice is also the child of a professor gives me a kinship with her I’d never identified when I was her age. Likewise, my increasingly complex relationship to gender norms as I’ve grown up caused me to identify much more strongly with Little Women‘s Jo March when I read the novel for my children’s lit class. Back when I was Jo’s age, I thought she was cool, but not as cool as the talking rodents in Brian Jacques’ Redwall books, or even as cool the seductive beauties of the Celtic-inspired romance novels I read in middle school, who represented a fantastically unattainable state of perfection to a clumsy, nerdy, unattractive girl confronting the awkwardness of puberty and teenagerhood. And it is largely retrospectively that I have come to appreciate my childhood in the romantically innocent sense I ascribed to it in my reading memoir: when I was in Montessori school and knew nothing else, it would not have occurred to me to think that my parents had done something special by raising me in an academic bubble with books and no television, encouraging my overactive imagination, and supporting me in my first forays to imitate my favorite children’s (and adult) literature and begin to produce my own creative writing. And so it is only now with the proper context—and having run the gauntlet of high school—that I feel calmly reflective enough to come back, and to begin to understand the literary tradition in which I was raised and to which I feel that I in some sense belong.

The greatest discovery I made in this arena came when I was working on my reading memoir in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Some of you may know that I was named Emily not because it was the most popular name for girls in 1990, but because one of the most influential texts in my mother’s girlhood and adolescence and young adulthood was a novel called Emily of New Moon, by L.M. Montgomery, who also wrote the Anne of Green Gables books. I was unimpressed by Emily of New Moon when my mother read it to me 13 years ago, and didn’t revisit it until it occurred to me that the novel which gave me my name (and the accompanying sense that I by my very existence belong to a literary tradition) deserved to be included in any discussion of the books important to my childhood. Talk about the word “memoir”: as I wrote in my memoir, when rereading the novel, I saw moi-même reflected back at me:

I read Emily of New Moon when I was seven, but I may have been too young to appreciate it properly—at the time, Emily didn’t enter the inner circle of fictional girls whose worlds I recreated in backyard and playground. Rereading the book years later, though, I am bowled over by the similarities between her world and my own. Like Emily, whose father takes a Rousseauian approach to her education, and smiles to himself when she personifies the trees in front of her house, my parents encouraged me to construct a world constrained only by the limits of my imagination. Like Emily, I didn’t let less imaginative adults or children stop me, but I did recruit sympathetic peers to co-star in my fantasies. Like Emily, I wrote pseudo-Romantic poetry about the seasons; like Emily, I claimed to (or at least wished to) remember my own birth. Emily reads Alice in Wonderland and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, lines from which (in addition to Macbeth and Hamlet) I would habitually recite to my parents from a precarious perch atop a red-and-yellow toy car. Montgomery wrote Emily of New Moon in 1923, after the First World War had tarnished the Romantic glow of childhood, but Emily’s innocent youth—like mine, perhaps—is a throwback to an earlier time. Twelve years after I put Warriorism [a set of religious rites I based on the Redwall books] to rest, I read Emily of New Moon again. When Emily’s father’s housekeeper says, “You talk queer—and you act queer—and at times you look queer. And you’re too old for your age—though that ain’t your fault. It comes of never mixing with other children,” I felt as if she were talking to me.

Shortly before Emily’s father dies of consumption (another rather Victorian thing to do), he says to her, “Your mother thought Emily the prettiest name in the world,—it was quaint and arch and delightful, she said.” I can see, now, why my mother might have thought the same; why she might have wanted a child with the ability and the freedom to, like Emily, listen for the Wind Woman, feel “the flash,” and squint until she could see the wallpaper suspended in the air. Monastery Effect and all, my mother might just have wound up with an Emily to live up to the name.

I didn’t discuss this in my memoir, but one of the reasons I like the sentence I quote in that first paragraph is because of its use of the word “queer.” In high school and beyond, I began to make a professional persona out of what I like to facetiously call “saying ‘sodomy’ at the dinner table”—the academic study of sexuality and identities and communities which construct themselves on sexuality terms. In my life as 20-year-old Emily Rutherford, writer, activist, and proto-historian, “queer” means something supposedly so very removed from the sense that Montgomery ascribed to it in that sentence. There is little to tie together the work I am learning how to do now (a field, I should mention, which I first entered through the lens of Kinsey, Krafft-Ebing, and others with early scientific approaches to sexual practices and behavior, the most literal sense I’ve ever dealt with of actually “saying ‘sodomy’ at the dinner table”) with a childhood where “queer” meant any kind of misfit. But I like to think that, recently, as I’ve tried to synthesize a child who wore funny clothes and believed in fairies and had a penchant for historical romanticism with an adolescent who became practiced at bringing sex and sexuality out of furtive teenage internet forays and into the legitimate public discourse, I wind up with a young adult to whom “queer” can mean many things at once. I might even go so far as to say that my present academic passion, the emergence of homosexuality as a cultural identity, exists so very conveniently on the cusp of that change in meaning, when “queer” takes on such a specific sexual connotation that to subsequent generations it actually loses that original meaning of “aslant,” unidentifiably out of the ordinary. While I know that we are all much more than the work that we do, there is something appealing in the notion that my interest in a cultural moment in which “queer” could simultaneously contain both meanings mirrors my desire to revisit a time in my own life when I, like the girl who gave me my name, was “queer” without respect to my sexual identity or politics.

I have, I supposed, deviated (heheh, get it?) rather far from the initial germ of this post, but I’d like to end by noting that Alyssa’s post also ends on the cusp of sexual possibility, with an allusion to her first kiss. It is not wildly outlandish overreading, then, to suggest that our childhood ties to literary cultures prepare us for how we will engage with the world as adults, no matter whether that preparation lies in the physical first overtures of romance or in the intellectualized realm of semantics of identity.

On Reading Sedgwick for the First Time

You promised yourself you would finish your French essay today, but it’s the end of the day and it still sits unwritten. Sometimes you just know in your gut whether your assigned or your voluntary intellectual labor is more important. Sometimes you just know.

(I first opened Epistemology of the Closet eight months ago in the Dupont Circle Kramerbooks and it was like staring at this incomprehensible wall of words. I’ve learned a lot since then.)

A perfect ending to today: the day when you make choices to rejoice in the sun, to drop your work and see your friends, to sit talking for hours, to glory in the possibilities of intellectual engagement wherever they may come, to open yourself up and be ready to receive them.

Then that wall of words hovering before your eyes in Kramerbooks? You see it splintering and cracking until it becomes not a solid wall but this liquid, all the letters contracting and colliding as the liquid type (I imagine it’s in a Courier font) funnels down in this spiral like a bathtub drain, funnels in this steady stream down to the center of your body. Then you come home at the end of the day and you open Sedgwick (now Tendencies, not Epistemology, but the sentiment stands) and then you can access the words—because you put aside an exercise in the prose of a language you don’t speak to talk and talk and talk and see your friends and love the sunshine.

I firmly believe—in fact, I try to remind myself of it daily—that you don’t learn how to read by going to classes, though maybe that’s a part of it. Because I also firmly believe that you learn how to read by living and being, and that if you live and be in seriousness and in earnest, but reserve just enough energy to come home at night and think about how you’ve lived and been that day, then you will grow bit by bit and the words will pour in and you will become an adult and keep becoming an adult and keep reading more things and learning how to read more things.

Then, if you don’t stop, someday you may come to stand before a lecture hall, or to sit across a dinner table, and you will say this to your literal or metaphorical children, and they won’t believe you until they realize for themselves with startling clarity that this is a mode of living open to them as well, if they are only themselves open to it.

Then they will come home at night and reflect and then they will realize how much bigger the world is than their French essay and then they will cry half of terror and half of joy.

Status Update

What’s on your mind?

Emily Rutherford…
needs to read Mrs. Dalloway again.
Needs to read George Eliot, anything.
Needs to read Nabokov, more than Lolita.
Needs to read Foucault.
Needs to read Blake, seriously, and Auden and Eliot—T.S.—more than desultorily.
Needs to read Jane Eyre.
Needs to read more Kant, more Nietzsche, more Rousseau.
Needs to read Sedgwick, Butler. The whole catalogue.
Needs to read Wilde, everything; Milton, everything but Paradise Lost, because twice is probably enough to get by on.
Needs to read Freud.
Needs to read Plato. And Aristotle. And Cicero.
Needs to read Elizabeth Bishop, more; Trollope, more; Dickens, more.
Needs to read Shaw, Symonds, Pater… and Plath.
Needs to read Melville, especially Bartleby; needs to read Emily Dickinson.
Needs to read needs to read needs to read.
Needs to read Mary Wollstonecraft for tomorrow.

——-
Addendum: Henry James. How could Emily Rutherford have forgotten him?

On Larry Kramer, and Doing History

I think of myself as a pragmatist when it comes to most kinds of action and activism, more conservative than I think many people perceive me to be. And yet there is much, all the same, that I find resonates in Larry Kramer’s point of view:

Temperamentally unsuited to ceding the pulpit, he has never accepted the national gay organizations as competent advocates for gay people, and, in the wake of New York’s failure to pass a same-sex-marriage law, can only repeat his contention that state-by-state incrementalism on such matters is “a waste of time.” If it depresses him, that’s because it’s personal: “I can’t afford to wait for gay marriage in ten years!” he moans. “Unless something radically changes, I won’t be able to leave my estate in any sensible way to David, and everything we built up together suddenly won’t be there to support him. That’s criminal.”

I have been learning a lot more about ACT-UP recently, forcing myself to confront my trepidation and depression at delving into the history of the beginnings of the AIDS crisis. I more and more feel as if it is my duty to learn this history, and be able to relate it—perhaps even more so than it is my duty to learn and teach to the next generation the history of queer identities, cultures, and communities more generally speaking. As I do so, I find myself understanding why and how pragmatism is not always equal to caution. I find myself crediting radicalization with not only feeling good, but actually getting shit done—though I also find myself realizing that, as with all historical narratives, things are more complicated than it is possible to explain in any space less than that between the covers of a book, if then.

If you read that New York magazine profile I linked to above, you’ll see that Kramer is at work on a 4,000-page gay history, not just of the times since people have begun to call themselves homosexual, but of the times before that as well. For once, I do feel informed enough to say that I’m skeptical of that approach. It’s one that appears to reside in double entendres and guesswork, in superimposing the attitudes of the 20th century on earlier eras, and it’s not (I find myself presumptuously thinking) the right way to be sweepingly radical. Yes, the history of American queerfolk is still in the process of being told. Yes, we could use a definitive textbook of American queer history. But the subdiscipline is still in the process of defining itself, and the “everyone is gay” approach has nothing more to recommend itself than the “no one is gay” approach. Maybe it could be a clever commentary on historiography’s heterosexism—but maybe it’s really just bad history. In this profile, Kramer’s conviction that Abraham Lincoln was gay reads like a conspiracy theory, and an allegation difficult to make with respect to a man who died before the coinage of the word “homosexual.”

I of course do not mean to deride Kramer’s contribution to anything, and in fact I have kind of a knee-jerk reaction to the people who do. ACT-UP is evidence that we need radicalism alongside moderation to get things done, that the two work together, that factionalization can (as Amin Ghaziani says) sometimes be productive. The fact that Kramer was, apparently, left out of the recent Harvard exhibition about ACT-UP is, to the best of my knowledge, ahistorical and unfair.

But I read these stories, and I take from them lessons on how to do my own history. When you tell a history, you should not be creating it out of whole cloth—but then how to tell it without creating it, without imposing a 21st-century lens upon a cultural context you may only after years of research begin to understand as natively as you do your own?

Larry Kramer, I have the utmost respect for you, but you have given all us proto-historians (or, well, this one, anyway) an object lesson in “pitfalls to avoid when doing gay history.”

QOTD (2009-12-10)

From Marx, Capital:

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and thereby also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of common wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in tis entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!

I’ve been hearing “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” all my life, but it is one thing to be familiar with the maxim and quite another to read it in context. I’ve got to confess that I haven’t always been the most enthusiastic about the political philosophy class in which I read this—the whole discipline isn’t really my cup of tea—but Marx is just one of those key thinkers I feel like a college student ought to read and care about. He’s a compelling writer, too, and his words come alive for me in a way that, say, Kant’s don’t. I found myself smiling in class, getting excited, wishing it really were possible to build a society along these lines. And when I realized I was doing this, I was proud of myself for not just dismissing this as absurdly foolish, not just letting myself fall into the Ivy-League trap of dismissing utopia as not sufficiently, well, realistic. It’s a long tradition of college students that has read Marx and seen in his theories a way towards a better world, and I do find myself wanting to be part of that tradition. Utopia like Marx’s is a powerful force for optimism, for staying sane, for going to bed and waking up and continuing to work, because he’s laid out a possible future (“From each according to his ability to each according to his needs) that many people believe is worth striving for.

Yes, I must also try to be a historian. I must also look to where and when communism has been woefully unsuccessful, and where and when an ideal has perished in the hands of human nature. And I must acknowledge the reality of my life and my possessions and my bourgeois attitudes and my class privilege and be honest with myself: if I am going to believe in this ideal, I’ve got to walk the walk—but finally reading the primary text certainly makes me want to try.

Anyone want to start a commune?

Methods of Mourning; or, Tying Together the Disparate Strands of a School Day

Today at lunch, a friend continued with me a conversation we had started to have online last night. To paraphrase, he was telling me about what he finds inspiring in the worldview of the Old-Testament prophets: these people, my friend said, believed that the smallest injustice was worthy of our attentions, and as valid a point of concern and moral attention as a large-scale conflict, or one to which society imparts greater weight and importance. Without having enough exposure to the Bible to know much about this school of thought, I told my friend I thought this was a morally valuable attitude, but a risky one. If we focus on every injustice, I told my friend, we risk self-annihilation. We risk becoming swallowed by a world of things to fix, and losing our identities and our senses of self in an avalanche of problems and traumas and tragedies. We risk not being able to function as productive members of society, because we can do nothing but be overwhelmed by how many of the reasons that the world is going to hell in a handbasket—and many of the problems which individual members of a society face on a daily basis—are outside of our control.

I didn’t explain this in the context of the conversation, but when I responded that way to my friend, I was of course coming from an intensely personal perspective. The past few months for me have been a struggle at balancing negatives and positives, at knowing when to celebrate and when to fight and when to mourn, at coming to terms with my decision that, in fact, it is important to be a cohesive individual with a set of ideals and principles and morals and desires and reasons for being—and that, what’s more, a person’s state of being is more than a collection of these things. I believe I have some experience with the dangers of being consumed by problems. At risk of being melodramatic, I’d argue that I grapple daily with whether it is as worth my time to better myself or to fulfill my own desires as it is to fight for some external cause. Now, I don’t believe in any sort of “virtue of selfishness.” That’s the farthest thing possible from my mind. But I do believe there is some value in self-preservation, in identity-preservation, in soul-preservation. I have to. I have to believe that I, as an individual, matter; that my rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness matter in the same way as those of someone who is beset by far greater inequalities and injustices than I am. Ego humana sum, to make an emphatic point by butchering Latin—maybe this is just the voice of the latent conservative in me whom I always suspect is lying in wait, but altruism (and I mean “altruism” in a positive sense) is not always my direct route to pleasure and fulfillment. Isn’t it morally defensible to balance self-fulfillment and other-fulfillment? I would argue that it is, and I would further argue that it is impossible to do so without compartmentalizing. Compartmentalizing is an ugly thing, but it is a survival tactic. It’s a way to get through the day and a way to sleep at night, a way to survive until the next day so that you can continue to develop your own self and continue to take on projects and perform actions that will further the elimination of inequality and injustice. If that makes any sense, it was the subtext of how I responded to my friend at lunch today.

Today was an appropriate day on which to raise this issue, subtext included. In my English class this morning, we discussed Sylvia Plath’s poetry, and if there is any art which is awash in the presentation and examination of particularized personal trauma, well, it’s Sylvia Plath’s poetry. I am not by any means qualified to discuss poetry; I feel in over my head in most of this class’s lectures and discussions. But I was enormously fascinated by my professor’s argument that Plath fundamentally altered the way we understand the genre of elegy—in fact, said my professor, she wreaked havoc upon it, smashed it, and turned it inside-out. By Plath’s later poetry, her elegies are not reverential, they are furious. She made it acceptable, said my professor, for successive poets—particularly women poets—to write elegiac poems that incorporated not the classical, reverential emotions of lamentation, praise, and consolation; but an anger and a frustration and even scarier actions like (to use my professor’s terminology again) desecration and annihilation.

My thought, in the context of developing my own juvenile philosophy, is that Plath’s smashing of the elegy, her pulverization of the memory of her father through that elegy-smashing, and, in the end, her own tragic self-annihilation, are some of the risks of being so fully consumed by mourning. My professor said that Plath characterized her reactions to her father’s death as a primary source of her poetic inspiration: what happens when your whole life revolves around mourning, revolves around confrontations with tragedy, trauma, and injustice? Again, I’m a rank amateur, but it seems to me as if Plath’s example suggests that you may be consumed—and destroyed—by the mourning.

Because of one of my chosen subfields of study, I find myself running up against elegies with some reasonable frequency. I am fascinated by how queer individuals have, over time, constructed community and culture, and how the values of community and culture interact in this historically marginalized group. There is perhaps no better example of these patterns than the outpouring of artistic expression that occurred at the onset of the AIDS crisis, as the decade turned from the 1970s to the 1980s—and continuing well into the 1990s. As far as I can understand it, for some gay writers and artists and musicians and theorists and other producers of cultural material, making art and culture that grappled with AIDS was a way of forming community around—collectivizing—uniting—a series of individual traumas and tragedies each important as the next, which, when taken together, became a grave human crisis. I look at this cultural outpouring and coming-together—represented in forms as diverse as Larry Kramer’s plays, Nelson Sullivan’s films, and dozens upon dozens of memoirs and indeed elegies—and I see an instantiation of the ideal which my friend raised. In this art (at least, when I read it), every death, every individual struggle, becomes both important in and of itself, and important as a constituent part of a historical and cultural moment. Another metaphor is Cleve Jones’ AIDS Memorial Quilt: each constituent part of that quilt is important in and of itself, no more or less important on the basis of why it is included in that quilt. These are all elegies, and they are all particular, though perhaps—it’s hard to say—they avoid the risks of subsumation which the Plath seems to illustrate.

I am fully aware of the fact that I have no right to talk about this kind of elegy. This particular genre of collective mourning is one of which I, who was born in 1990, have no possible conception. Today, of course, is World AIDS Day—and I have struggled for the past week to think about whether I have anything to say concerning a crisis which I tend to historicize and yet is fully contemporary; a crisis whose onset and whose particular tragedies I did not and have not witnessed. And yet I have chosen history as my path towards understanding these moments of crisis, and I believe that I do have a duty to understand them, and to do what I can to further the telling of these stories. If each injustice, each death, each singular struggle is a legitimate subject of our attention—and our elegies—it behooves me as someone who wishes to learn to be a historian (but it also behooves all of us) to try.

After the exchange with my friend about Prophets and particular problems, lunch passed without mention of mourning for the victims of life and death. Lunch passed in lightness and brightness, in the silliness that ensues when good friends share a table and a conversation, and when I finally tore myself away I hurried to class across a quad awash in sunlight. I caught myself suddenly joyful: excited for my class, delighted to be moving from one space I enjoyed to another, across the bright and beautiful and green quad. I slowed my pace for a few minutes (this, it should be noted, made me late to class, and earned a sarcastic comment from my professor), and I wondered: why am I seizing this joy? Why am I brushing aside the weight of undeserved deaths to be made happy by something so ridiculous—and so absurdly self-interested—as walking from point A to point B in nice weather?

Well, reader, I think I know why: it is because the task of elegy is an enormous one, a terrifying one, a profoundly disturbing and troubling one. It is because life is not worth living, and death is thus not worth confronting and mourning, without the promise of truth through beauty. And it is because somehow, in some way, we all have to take the threads of our work days, and the knowledge we have gained in them, and the conversations we have had throughout them, and braid all those threads together into a strand which is somehow strong enough to let us fall asleep tonight, so that we can wake up again tomorrow and go about making the world—and ourselves—worth continuing.