Lazy Saturday...

[fajrdrako]

It's been a funny day. I slept twelve hours last night - close enough - and it felt good. Planned to do things, ended up reading and then falling asleep on the sofa. What happened to the life of accomplishment and excitement that I want to be living?

Watched some more of Cowboy Bebop. I'm enjoying it very much - and it reminds me very much of Firefly: the old west ambience, the country-western music, the notion that being a bounty hunter isn't so unlike whatever it is that Mal Reynolds does for a living, and the people they meet have a certain resemblance. The fact that they fly around in a battered of spaceship which they love. The fact that - though on the surface the men are not much alike - they have a similar sense of humour, and a similar sense of courage.

Of course, resembling Firefly is not a bad thing. Not at all.

Comments

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was a very odd dream. Despite the fact I had gone on to do a PhD, & c., I found out (in the present day) that I had only got a Third, not a 2/1, in my first degree, and although I had only just found out this mistake, everyone was treating me as a fake, a fraud.

I think what it was indicating is that sometimes I wonder why, if I am as good as my qualifications, publications & c, show, am I so under-valued in society? Does the fact that I keep meeting with rejection, & c., reflect my real worthlessness? I was supposed to achieve great things. I believed I could. I suppose a book, and various articles are something - but they haven't given me any of the material security I desperately need.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think that's the problem. The disparity between academic/intellectual accomplishment and professional accomplishment. It's distressing and disorienting.

My problem is that I feel so far from my days as a historian that I am ashamed of the way I have not kept up with the historian's skills on which I once prided myself, and currently see no feasible way to do so.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

The social isolation is the worst part: not being part of a community of scholars any more. The other year, I went to an exhibition opening at Glasgow University, and coming away from it, looking back at the windows lit up in the Quadrangle, I felt as if I had been expelled from paradise again.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

The social isolation is the worst part: not being part of a community of scholars any more.

Yup. People look at me clearly thinking, "Why would anyone want to study the twelfth century?", or they argue with me about the historicity of Robin Hood or some such topic based on what they saw on TV as a kid. My years of academic scholarship mean nothing to them, but still mean a lot to me. This isn't to blame them - how could they have any kind of a concept of either the medieval period or my own experiences as a student of this material, and what it meant to me? They couldn't. They can't. They didn't even know me then. There's no reason I should expect them to understand. Especially when academic scholarship itself is not something that's respected in our society.

It does leave me feeling isolated. A big central part of my life - however lapsed, I value it as much as I ever did, and it was once my life - and I can't even talk about it with my friends. And when I try, I'm just left more frustrated than ever because their reactions; so I don't talk about it, and feel the silence even more.

"Expelled from paradise" is a good way of putting it.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

This is why I'm so grateful for the internet: meeting people like you, and several others in the group, who care about these things. What tends to frustrate me (as it clearly does you) are people who think that something they've seen in a movie, or some trashy novel or 'popular' history, gives their arguments as much weight and validity as having studied it formally; at understanding sources, research method, & c. They then accuse you of being "elitist" - as if that's a bad thing. I'm happy to learn from people whose expertise I respect (some of these great new publications that I've been catching up on, that have appeared in the past 20 years), and my views on a lot of things have shifted through absorbing new scholarship. But too many people think it's "elitist" to acknowledge that there's a sort of ladder of expertise. I wouldn't place myself very high on it - there are dozens of Professors & c. up at the top - but neither of us is on the ground.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

This is why I'm so grateful for the internet

Yes, excatly! I am so thankful for all of you.

What tends to frustrate me (as it clearly does you) are people who think that something they've seen in a movie, or some trashy novel or 'popular' history, gives their arguments as much weight and validity as having studied it formally

Yes. I want to say: I spent five years of my life studying this from the original source material, slaving over it with a passionate intensity, and you think you know better than I do when you've focussed on the subject at all? And yes, of course, that's just it, they do think they know better.... and they're wrong. But I don't know how to express that without giving offense. Because they are so sure they know.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, contemporary culture seems to hold that uninformed opinion should carry the same weight as informed opinion... I've come across this a lot in the museums/galleries sector, where it's become trendy for opinions and interpretations by visitors to be posted on the walls: interesting, sometimes, amusing, but sometimes totally wrong-headed. A few years ago, one art gallery in England came horribly unstuck by allowing the visitors to vote which of a temporary collection of sculptures they wanted the gallery to keep. The visitors voted for the work of least artistic merit: a kitsch black and gold figure of the ex-Princess of Wales... (There was an amused article on this in the Museums Journal - yet Museums Journal has been at the forefront of all this "anti-elitist", "we mustn't pretend that the experts have any real expertise" bullshit.

The IMDb board on Kingdom of Heaven sometimes makes me seethe... People who think that it's just "common sense" that 12C people would be openly expressing agnostic or Unitarian-type points of view; or who thought the royal house of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was of Arab stock. People who think James Reston is a historian. Or one lad who posted lately, upholding one historian (not a bad one, when he stays on topic and doesn't allow his contemporary politics to spill over) above all others, simply because he's a fellow-American, and so many of the others available in English are British. I'd love to put up a sign: "You are now entering the 12C. It is a different universe. Please check your present-day national identity and hang-ups at the door."

Part of the problem seems to be the idea that "anyone can be a historian" - all you have to do is be able to read. They have no idea about interpreting and evaluating primary sources, about reading them in the original languages... I recall once someone recommending something on ancient history - which was actually completely discredited by historians - by a surgeon. (It wasn't even remotely medically related, either.) I told the person who recommended it that I might consider it... only if he would allow me to operate on him next time he needed surgery, since I know as much about surgery as this guy did about history. James Reston is a journalist, not a historian - he goes for the most sensational interpretation every time, and doesn't know how to evaluate the different sources. The same is true of David Boyle (Blondel's Song): he's an economist, and quite out of his depth on the politics and culture of 12C.