Friday 16 October 2009

srsly

"stop"gentlemen eat bread

I just found these again.
When it was still warm and sunny, Kevin and I went to the countryside to eat bread and observe what life is like in tiny villages. The countryside is very nice as long as it's not too flat. Driving in a car is also very nice, especially when you sing along to proper tweepop or proper Britpop.
Right now, all you can do is stay indoors where it's warm.

That's alright though - if you have to write essays or translate old documents from Latin or not-quite-Ancient-and-not-quite-contemporary Greek all day anyway, it's okay to just stay in. Now I just wish Neil Bartlett's sort-of biography of Oscar Wilde wouldn't distract me from what I really ought to do... in my research seminar, we keep having discussions about how to "do" history - how to do the research, how to write about things, about all the different theories. It's especially interesting because there are only four students and one professor, none of us seems to be in love with post-modernism, at least concerning history, and everyone actually cares about what to do with the medieval documents we're studying, what do we want to know, what do we want to ask, how are we going to get any answers?
As you can imagine, a historian who's interested in medieval Dalmatia will offer a different answer than Neil Bartlett. But I feel so lucky to know about all the different options, not to feel confined by one theory or one approach. Right now I'd just like to move away to a country where history is less rigid, less influenced by all those big German theories and discussions, where style isn't suspicious and seen as a lack of seriousness. Articles and books written in German still make me want to go to sleep - those about history I mean, not Thomas Mann of course! Honestly, sometimes I just want to get up and scream:


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