A tribute

A bit about this blog.

The name comes from a quote by Robert Kennedy. The full text of the speech, given shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down, can be found here: http://www.rfkmemorial.org/lifevision/onthemindlessmenaceofviolence/. The point of the speech is that we’re all human, so cut that violent shit out. Needless to say, RFK was similarly gunned down shortly thereafter. I imagine that he would have wanted to shout, “Weren’t you fucking listening?” At least, I would have wanted to yell that.

The URL to this page, revtransunciv, comes from the URL of the blog I wrote while studying abroad in Nicaragua. That one was called RevTransCiv.blogspot.com and was named after the program I was taking – Revolution, Transformation and Civil Society. RevTransUnCiv - Revolution, Transformation and a play on the word uncivilized - just sounded cheeky, so I used it.

I’ve just had my first few classes of the term. Thinking that it is the last time for a long time that I’ll have a first few classes is a bit depressing. So it goes. I am, however, excited to throw myself at my work.

I do this thing when I work. I seem to work much more than I do. I am often considered a very serious – even perfectionist – student. Unfortunately for my work and fortunately for my social life, I am less serious than I’d like to be. That will hopefully change this term. I think one (of the vast amount) of the things looming between my writing and that of the artistic scholars I listed last post is that they put an immense amount of effort into their work. I tend to spend more time relaxing from doing so much work than actually doing said work. That is, until the last few weeks of term. Then, as I scrape what is left of me off the road of academia, I get to say that my work wasn’t as great as it could’ve been because I did it all last minute. Convenient, right?

I often feel like my work roughly approximated Tenacious D’s song, “Tribute”. This is not the greatest work in the world – this is just a tribute. It’s not what it was in my head. It’s not the greatness I imagined it would be. It pays lip service to that thing. It is like a margin sketch of Guernica; it’s cool that you can do it, but no one wants a margin sketch. They want the real thing, or at least a good print of it, or something new and innovative.

Well, no longer, says I. Not this term. I’m going out with style. Or something.

Though, tonight I am going to a concert instead of starting my writing for next week.

Welcome to the monkey house

I haven’t written since Nicaragua, and that was nearly two years and a few skins ago. The purpose of this space is communication to those interested, and to have something constructive to procrastinate with. My target audience is not anonymous to me, but I don’t mean to discourage the occasional stumbling passerby.

I am currently approaching the end of my career as a full-time student, at least for the moment. With this event comes a process, and I’m in the midst of sorting that bit out. I’m writing two full-length undergraduate theses in academic areas, helping run an educational forum, and I’m attempting to start an independent bookstore near Troy, NY. Hopefully the bookstore bit works out so that I have some cash to pay off my considerably endowed loans when they come knocking.

I was inspired to start this blog after a friend of mine caved and admitted that she wrote one. I read it, loved it, and figured that I had some similar questions that I wanted to poke at in anonymous public.

I’ve been listening to Trevor Wilson, a fellow student here, (http://www.myspace.com/tvwilson) and thinking about art and myself, as will come as no surprise to anyone who either knows me or tends to read blogs. I attend a very small liberal arts school and most of my friends are constantly creating art. They think in terms of art as life, of art as creation and as discernment. I tend to have a pretty loose definition of what qualifies as ‘art’, but as a more academic student I tend to have a lot of difficulty with creation. Discernment I can do. Analysis I’m great at. Synthesis and invention are my weak points. My work is not art. Not even the most liberal of arts students would approach my essays – my usual form of production – and exclaim over my artistic prowess.

But there is art to be had in academia. I’ve read great works of academic prowess where there is art not only in the writing, but also in the weaving of different analyses and trains of thought into comprehensive, useful, and above all, beautiful arguments. Edward Said does that in Orientalism; Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities; Costas M. Constantinou in On the Way to Diplomacy, the list goes on. Even Roger Lancaster in Life is Hard touches brilliance, and I tend to look down on ethnographies due to their tendency to stereotype and reduce the complexity of entire peoples.

So that is my first difficulty of the term. I want to touch that brilliance in all of my work. Hope you can too.