Ranging Bodies and Borders

I haven’t had a chance to listen to this with sound (I’m in my office) but the images are great!

A little lesson in connecting the past to the present from my mother:

In trying to convey her excitement as a young girl seeing Annie Oakley “live” (the actress who played Annie Oakley- lest you think my mother is much older than she is!!!!):

“Seeing Annie Oakley then was like young girls seeing Brittney Spears today!”

Now there’s a comparison you don’t hear every day.

Seriously though, I am looking forward to hearing more from my Mom about her perceptions of all the “Western” TV and film personalities from her youth and how she related to them as a girl. In a previous post I discussed how my childhood was not immersed in the  stories of the “frontier” in the same way that my husband’s childhood was. However,  I recently realized I was leaving out The Little House on the Prairie books (not to mention my fanatic devotion to the TV series). I remember taking out each of the books of the series from Sullivan Free library. I can even remember exactly where they were shelved, right next to the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series.

So, I think I’ve been avoiding this blog because its visibility has changed. Originally I started this blog with the intention of only sharing it with Dan and Deborah- both of whom are my consummate cheerleaders and have been listening to my thoughts on this project from its inception. So, many of the first posts are written in a sort of shorthand – to remind myself of particular points of reference or central themes to keep my brain on track. However, little by little I have opened it up to other eyes and brains – many of whom do not know all of the details fueling the larger landscape of my dissertation. Which, of course, makes more sense if I’m going to use the format of a Blog on the wonderful world of the “interweb”. So, although this site will continue to function as a space where I hash out ideas and generally try to keep the ball rolling when my formal writing is “stuck”- it will also become a space where I work on clarifying my ideas and grounding my language. Often friends and family ask about my progress and the work I am doing and a site like this might be a great way to share what I’m doing (as well as how I’m doing). Having a more diverse readership will force me to distill my words and ideas into their most accesible form. This does not mean making my work less complex- but making  my words more succinct, to provide a detailled and navigatable map from idea to idea.  It is often easy when my head is immersed in a bunch of academic texts to make huge leaps of logic in my writing, making what seem to me to be lucid claims that are actually backgrounded by a slew of tangled theories and literary histories. Also, academic terms or “jargon” can sometimes become an easy way to “shorthand” an idea or theoretical framework, however, this can alienate readers and add a sense of exclusion I want to avoid. This is something I don’t necessarily enjoy in other academic’s writing- except when it makes me feel “smart” when I know what they’re talking about- and I’d like to work against that impulse and tradition in academic writing. (In the same breath I love the poetic quality and  complexity of writers like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Julia Kristeva, and Deleuze and Guattari- but maybe more on this in another post).

 In addition, I will probably expand the subect matter of the blog to include my teaching and more general day-to-day observations and events, however the primary subject matter will be  moving toward the end goal of my degree. Beginning again.