Hoarding Minutiae

I am a packrat. A hoarder. A collector. Whatever you want to call it. I make excuses like “it’s genetic” (my grandparents all kept everything “in case it was useful someday”, almost to the point of pathology), “but what if I will want it eventually” and “nostalgia” and in the meantime, books and papers and …..well, mostly books pile up around me.

And right now my mom and my uncles are sorting through my grandfather’s house, and his lifetime of hoarding and saving everything that came through the door. It’s a daunting task, and a stressful one, and a sad one. How do you balance the longing to acknowledge the past with the desire to lead a simple(ish) life yourself, and the space limitations of modern middle-class living?

It’s made even more difficult, emotionally, by the fact that my family has not just a lengthy history, but a strong sense of history. We are all well aware that sometimes the most innocuous-looking things can turn out to be important. I just read a biography of a Tudor woman where most of the information for her life comes from household accounts. But, really, once the account books aren’t of any use for tax purposes or something similar, who wants to keep them around? But they are historically one of the best sources we have for daily life one or two or five hundred years ago.

We want to keep the important things, but how do we know what the important things are? What’s important now may not be important in one or two or five hundred years. And while there is an argument to be made about the cultural knowledge that comes from shifting priorities, I also can’t help but wish that more minutiae survived.

This is one reason that I’m so excited that the Library of Congress has the entire public Twitter archive now. Past Tweets may not be of huge significance (although some are, either culturally or personally), but the collection of cultural minutiae has the potential to be fascinating not only for current sociologists, linguists, and anthropologists, but for future historians as well. I just wish it were so easy to save and store the physical collections of minutiae as well.

(Apparently I really like the word "minutiae"...)

Ponderings

I just started reading Bess of Hardwick by Mary S. Lovell. It’s been on my TBR list for literally years, and last year I picked up a copy at Oxfam, and now I’m finally getting to it.

One problem I have, as a confirmed book addict, is that everything I read makes me want to read more. Reading Blink, which I finished this afternoon, made me want to read The Tipping Point and other sociological/psychological things. But Bess is insidious. Even after just reading the introduction, I want to read a ton of stuff.

None of it’s really related to the Tudors, though – they’re a little bit out of my period. No, what the introduction to Bess did is make me want to get back to my own research: music in Middle English literature. I have over 200 articles and many, many poems saved on their own hard drive, just waiting for my attention. And they’re always at the back of my mind, but what the introduction to Bess has done is bring them to the front.

Blink aided and abetted this as well, with all its talk of experts being able to hone their snap judgment ability. I found myself wanting to be an expert in something – and what am I an expert in? Middle English poetry and its connection to music. I also had lunch today with a PhD-student friend of mine, and that helped the motivation as well.

I have been telling myself that I will keep collecting and reading articles and poems (thank goodness for TEAMS) so that when I am financially able to do a PhD, I won’t be completely out of the loop. Maybe it’s time that I make a dedicated study plan and actually do it.

Epic films, part one

Over Easter, I had a lot of time on my hands and, like I said in a previous entry, I was in the mood for long-form entertainment. So I fulfilled some Easter traditions, and gave in to some cravings, and watched some epic films.

Gone with the Wind:

This had been on my mind for ages, probably close to a year off and on. And when mental_floss reminded me of the Carol Burnett “Went with the Wind,” and posted some of the screen tests for Gone with the Wind, I decided to watch the whole thing.

I had forgotten how incredibly good that movie is. Yeah, it’s incredibly long, but it doesn’t drag. The story keeps moving, from pretty nearly the first scene all the way through to the end. So much happens, but it’s not overwhelming with anything either. It’s incredibly well-paced.

And it’s incredibly well-acted, too. Hattie McDaniels, of course, won Best Supporting Actress (her acceptance speech was another clip on mental_floss, and it made me tear up). But Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable are nearly perfect. Rhett is not a horrible person: he’s mercenary and he admits it. But Scarlett …. is. She’s mercenary, and knows it, but does her absolute best to make it appear otherwise. She’s a horrible person, but you can’t help but sympathize with her. You love her and, even while you want her to get her comeuppance somehow, you still want her to succeed.

I had expected to find the movie more dated. It is so often seen as a love song and an elegy to the Old South. There are definitely elements of racism. And it certainly wouldn’t be made today. But I felt, while watching it this time, that the “oh, woe are we” part of it was found more in the screen narration (someone pleeeeease tell me the actual term for this? The written narration that comes up on the screen, like the dialogue in silent movies) rather than in the story or the acting. Scarlett was a belle of the Old South, no question, and she milked that for all that it was worth. And there are certainly characters who moan the loss of the Old South way of life. But both Scarlett and Melanie do their absolute best, everything they can, to move on from that way of life and to adapt to the new order and the new lifestyle that they must. Scarlett does it by becoming a businesswoman and a fantastic manager of Tara. Melanie does it through emotional support, and by refusing to give in to fear and despair the way that Scarlett’s family does. Two very different women, but both adapting in their own way.

I also found myself much more frustrated with Ashley than I remember being before. He explicitly tells Scarlett that if it weren’t for Melanie, he’d marry her, that he loves her. Is it really any wonder that she can’t fully move on from that? If Ashley had been harsh at the beginning, and been honest with Scarlett about his true feelings, it could have been a much different story.

I love the ending, too. It’s complete, but also full of hope for things to come. I like to think that Scarlett finds a way to get Rhett back, and makes Tara a successful plantation again. I can’t quite imagine the exact way that she does it, but I fully believe that she will.

The Ten Commandments:

This is an Easter tradition in the US, and it’s been a few years since I’ve seen it. This, unlike Gone with the Wind, was dated. The acting was good, but the presentation was incredibly dated. There was even a speech at the beginning about … I don’t remember, something about standing up to government and following rules and whatever else. I didn’t really pay attention.

The acting was so incredibly stylized. It’s not bad, of course, but it’s very stylized. There were a few points where I couldn’t help laughing, because by modern standards, it’s so ridiculous. The plagues were skimmed over – not even montaged! River to blood, immediately followed by death of the first-born.

I also, as a feminist, was a bit disturbed by the implication that “God hardening pharaoh’s heart” was done by a jealous woman. A beautiful, well-acted jealous woman, but still a jealous woman. It struck me as sexist in a way that it hasn’t before. (of course, it’s been at least ten years since I’d watched the whole thing. Probably more like fifteen.)

But Charlton Heston is fantastic. So once I’d watched The Ten Commandments, I had to watch something else of his.

Ben Hur:

What can I say about Ben-Hur? It, like Gone with the Wind, is a nearly perfect film. It’s got good pacing, good acting, everything. There’s a reason that it won a record number of Oscars. It actually wouldn’t be unthinkable that this could be made today.

*sigh*

As you can tell, I’m kind of running out of steam. I’ll have to write about my absolute love for Peter O’Toole (Lawrence of Arabia, The Lion in Winter, sparked by Casanova) some other time. (And maybe by then I’ll have watched Becket.) (And, also, hopefully it won’t take me a month to get to it.)

Election thoughts

It’s Election Day in the UK. It’s a tense election here, and people are really looking forward to the end of the campaigning. To which I say, “You have no idea of how easy you have it.”

I kind of like the UK system of elections. I don’t mean the bizarre constituencies or the first-past-the-post thing (although I think it makes some sense with a more than two-party election) or the whole “voting for a party and not a candidate” idea. No, I like that you don’t officially know when an election is until a month or so before the election. I like that elections must be no more than five years apart, but can be less if needed. I like that the UK politicians aren’t in a nearly-constant state of outright campaigning. I understand the benefits of knowing that there will be an election for this post on this day in this year (aka the US system), but I have to say that I really like that the UK, in general, lets politicians do their jobs without the pressure of spending half their time trying to keep their job. I like that there aren’t political posters plastering the streets for more than a month.

It will be interesting to see what happens in this election. It’s always slightly more interesting when you don’t have a huge emotional investment in the outcome; you can see a little bit more clearly. Because I hold fairly liberal political views on most things, I would like to see Labour and the Liberals do well. But when it comes right down to it, I don’t have a real investment in this election, because I can’t vote here.

I saw a headline yesterday – and, to be fair, I didn’t read the article – that said that Gordon Brown claimed the debates had clouded the campaign. There’s a lesson in that for everyone, I think: Just because something doesn’t go your way doesn’t mean that it is essentially bad. The actual voters I know who watched the debates appreciated them. Just because Gordon Brown didn’t do well at them doesn’t mean that they have been bad for the process. If you can’t hold up your manifesto and maintain your position at a debate (for which you have had quite a lot of preparation time, theoretically), how do you expect to be able to run a country? It’s an attitude that I think is more prevalent in the US. Frequently, if an election doesn’t go a party’s way, they expend a lot of money, time, and energy on trying to discredit that election. Both sides do this. It’s a very bipartisan thing, this sense of entitlement. But, as in a quotation from The West Wing: In a democracy, sometimes the other guy wins. Also: You lost, deal with it.

(And maybe try a little harder next time.)