up. must be ready.
Dec. 2nd, 2011 07:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethFeeling of impending doom can take a hike. I had both sleep and study. Granted, about two hours of each, and I've been up since 0200, but that's an improvement over what I expected. I ate food, I packed food, I packed my computer (which crashed this morning but worked once I turned it off and on again), I didn't unpack my books since last week. I am ready to go.
And it's the last lesson. Next time is only a revision lesson with individual appointments, and then there is only an exam.
... I'm increasingly convinced I've forgot how to write in academic, or what sort of thing goes in exams. It's also a problem that I really, really, really don't care any more, it's all made of stupid and made up rubbish. I mean, the stuff about treatment of women is all the same stuff all the time, and half these essays spice it up with weird stuff about the phallic whatsits or incestual lesbianism, and it's just annoying. I could see the point if we ended up writing stuff that wasn't racist sexist garbage, but doing three or six or more years of this to just be able to point at stuff and go 'yep, that's sexist!' is really annoying.
Accusations the powerful aim at the weak: childish, immature, emotional, irrational, incapable of real learning, just made that way. Also that they're both cowardly and vicious, which is daft.
There's an assortment of inflections when these things get aimed at women or people with darker skins or people from lower classes, but that's the basics.
however many years we continue to study they will continue to be the basics.
The basic position of the powerful is that it is reasonable for them to be powerful, and that right thinking rational people would agree with them entirely. Therefore the accusations they level at everyone else involve them being irrational, mostly for thinking perhaps it's not reasonable after all.
Furthermore the art preferred by the powerful is the only proper true expressive and universal art, since it expresses the universal truths that powerful people should of course be powerful. Everyone else's art isn't proper art. Not because they're trying to say something else, of course, just because they're only expressing small local concerns that don't touch the grand themes of common humanity, probably because they're just weaker in the mind and don't have the right education. If they did, they would of course see that the hierarchy and structures as currently configured are the grand universal timeless truths of existence.
:-p
I'm bored.
Except we've been being taught all this stuff about seeing through the Of Course for years, so there's a different Of Course built in, presumably the one approved of by teachers. Who are Of Course the clever rational ones around here. Except the more essays I read involving Freud the less I can believe that. Though there's a whole strand that says Of Course rational isn't the only thing to value, and the repressed subconscious irrational whatsits are more important really.
It's like whenever there's stories about Vulcans. Sooner or later they'll be about how logic is insufficient because secretly they need to be more human, and human is defined by Americans trying to write drama, so there's emotion all over the place. I don't feel logic is insufficient. Just the TV Vulcans aren't using proper logic. Making TV people more logical would work plenty well. At least for didactic do it like this purposes; for cathartic purposes it would not so much work. And for the purposes mostly served by those episodes of Star Trek involving running around in underwear and/or sitting in decon, logic is not the point.
So trying to juggle a story so it values all varities of people equally, when that involves valuing different points on the rational/emotional scale equally, that would be a pretty good trick. Especially if you're try and make both something that teaches only true lessons (about the interdependence of all living things and how you need teamwork and alliances, rather than, just for instance, ever bigger bombs), but also has an emotional strand with yearning->getting and maybe some cathartic opportunity for feeling really big emotions... that's asking rather a lot of a story.
We didn't study any story like that. We study stories full of ugly.
At least once theory people have pulled them apart and poked around in their guts and explained them, there's somehow ugly everywhere.
Okay. Time to go catch a bus.
And it's the last lesson. Next time is only a revision lesson with individual appointments, and then there is only an exam.
... I'm increasingly convinced I've forgot how to write in academic, or what sort of thing goes in exams. It's also a problem that I really, really, really don't care any more, it's all made of stupid and made up rubbish. I mean, the stuff about treatment of women is all the same stuff all the time, and half these essays spice it up with weird stuff about the phallic whatsits or incestual lesbianism, and it's just annoying. I could see the point if we ended up writing stuff that wasn't racist sexist garbage, but doing three or six or more years of this to just be able to point at stuff and go 'yep, that's sexist!' is really annoying.
Accusations the powerful aim at the weak: childish, immature, emotional, irrational, incapable of real learning, just made that way. Also that they're both cowardly and vicious, which is daft.
There's an assortment of inflections when these things get aimed at women or people with darker skins or people from lower classes, but that's the basics.
however many years we continue to study they will continue to be the basics.
The basic position of the powerful is that it is reasonable for them to be powerful, and that right thinking rational people would agree with them entirely. Therefore the accusations they level at everyone else involve them being irrational, mostly for thinking perhaps it's not reasonable after all.
Furthermore the art preferred by the powerful is the only proper true expressive and universal art, since it expresses the universal truths that powerful people should of course be powerful. Everyone else's art isn't proper art. Not because they're trying to say something else, of course, just because they're only expressing small local concerns that don't touch the grand themes of common humanity, probably because they're just weaker in the mind and don't have the right education. If they did, they would of course see that the hierarchy and structures as currently configured are the grand universal timeless truths of existence.
:-p
I'm bored.
Except we've been being taught all this stuff about seeing through the Of Course for years, so there's a different Of Course built in, presumably the one approved of by teachers. Who are Of Course the clever rational ones around here. Except the more essays I read involving Freud the less I can believe that. Though there's a whole strand that says Of Course rational isn't the only thing to value, and the repressed subconscious irrational whatsits are more important really.
It's like whenever there's stories about Vulcans. Sooner or later they'll be about how logic is insufficient because secretly they need to be more human, and human is defined by Americans trying to write drama, so there's emotion all over the place. I don't feel logic is insufficient. Just the TV Vulcans aren't using proper logic. Making TV people more logical would work plenty well. At least for didactic do it like this purposes; for cathartic purposes it would not so much work. And for the purposes mostly served by those episodes of Star Trek involving running around in underwear and/or sitting in decon, logic is not the point.
So trying to juggle a story so it values all varities of people equally, when that involves valuing different points on the rational/emotional scale equally, that would be a pretty good trick. Especially if you're try and make both something that teaches only true lessons (about the interdependence of all living things and how you need teamwork and alliances, rather than, just for instance, ever bigger bombs), but also has an emotional strand with yearning->getting and maybe some cathartic opportunity for feeling really big emotions... that's asking rather a lot of a story.
We didn't study any story like that. We study stories full of ugly.
At least once theory people have pulled them apart and poked around in their guts and explained them, there's somehow ugly everywhere.
Okay. Time to go catch a bus.