Results of Ruminations

Why do we tell stories? Yeah, yeah, I know: To make sense of the world, to preserve our culture and heritage, to explain what we could be. There are lots of reasons, and a lot of them also make sense (which is nice), but I've been thinking a lot about stories lately. Maybe it's because it's late but I'm worried the insomnia that's been plaguing me the last three nights is lurking behind me; maybe it's because my own sense of self-worth and legacy resides in twenty-six fragile letters, pushed back and forth on my keyboard millions of times and my stories remain almost entirely unread; maybe it's because the late July night outside of my now-open window is cooler than July usually is, and that feels like a detail that ought to be remembered somehow, if even in a nebulous, digital way. Maybe there are more reasons for telling stories than there are stories to be told, or maybe because there are really only a handful of each, but the veneer is different enou...

Not too long ago, I wrote about my frustration with teaching World War I . I had finished my teaching of the unit, in which I spent two weeks talking about strategies, conditions, battles, causes, and consequences of the First World War. Some of the days--particularly when we talk about shell shock/PTSD and the Armenian genocide--are heavy, dark, and depressing. One of my primary purposes is to shock the students out of complacency that "World War I was bad, I guess, but it was nothing  compared to World War II, which is so much better ." That sense of comparison frustrates me, which means I take it as a personal challenge to help my students understand that it's not a matter of which was worse, but instead a recognition of the tragedy that both were. And since they know comparatively little about the First World War, I take it upon myself to drive home the point. Word Choice As I've said before , I'm not a big swearing guy. I try to be really conscientious of ...

This article shocked me. I know that is click bait on my part, but you should go back and look at it. Can you conceive of an American war* in which over 2 million soldiers' lives were lost? Can you then imagine them not being remembered? A memorial to commemorate the names of the fallen would be, were it to be modeled after the Vietnam War memorial, over eight and a half miles long.  This memorial is about a quarter of a mile long. Picture source . I finished my annual rereading of All Quiet on the Western Front . It's always a difficult read, and the last fifty pages are particularly grim, if only because of the hopelessness that permeates it. The pity of war is rendered so starkly there that I feel my teaching of the topic is in some ways superfluous. Nevertheless, I feel I have an obligation to teach about the First World War with as much sympathy and detail as I can muster, if only because it is so often misremembered by America--and almost forgotten by German...

Where I live, there's just enough light pollution to keep most stars at bay. How interesting it is to consider that technology can push away the ancient photograph of celestial bodies that nightly parades, moving so predictably that we long assumed the stars more permanent than kings, more powerful than rulers. Were a civilization 65 million light years away to look through its telescope at our pale blue dot, they would see the light reflected off of dinosaur hides and feathers. Maybe that's why aliens haven't visited our planet: They're afraid of our teeth. The vastness of space is so mind-boggling big that it's sometimes easier to entrench than explore, to recoil instead of redouble our efforts to learn more. That emptiness--the same sky that almost everyone I know sleeps beneath--means something different to each person. How interesting it is to consider that the immensity of the galaxy in which we live, despite its ubiquity, can mean something so separate fr...

Guy Sajer: Too many people learn about war with no inconvenience to themselves...One should really read such accounts under compulsion, in discomfort...One should read about war in the worst circumstances, when everything is going badly, remembering that the torments of peace are trivial...One should read about war standing up, late at night, when one is tired. If you don't recognize the name of the man who gave that quote, you would be forgiven. He only wrote one book : The Forgotten Soldier , a memoir of his own experience as a German infantryman during World War II. When I studied the World Wars at university, this was the only assigned text (aside from the textbook, because who reads those, honestly?) that I couldn't finish. Part of my struggle was practical: It's a long book and I wouldn't devote all the time I needed to in order to finish it off. The other part was emotional: Sajer has some incredible stories about the war, but it became more and more bleak t...

I have returned from my time in Europe, studying World War II with some of my students and my wife. It was a remarkable, painful, enjoyable experience--one that I tried to carefully document, in the hopes of remembering it better and longer. Returning home to a snow-drenched Utah was difficult, particularly when I remember that not 48 hours ago I was standing in Stratford-upon-Avon and feeling whole. It was illusory, of course, and temporary. Nevertheless, I'm glad I went. I'm happy to be home safely. There's much to return to, much to recall and to rebuild. I wrote in my journal daily whilst away, but I haven't put a lot of time into essays, save one on Sachsenhausen and another on Normandy . Being away from the daily effort of trying to improve my writing via the radical practice of writing more ended up a larger hardship than I expected. It was one thing to write, in the exhausted fugue of a jet-lagged tourist, the broad strokes and quick details of my day. It...

16 January 2017--The Beaches of Normandy The rain-slicked parking lot spread before the tour group as we disembarked. Signs in English (first) and French (second) urged visitors to treat the place as hallowed and sacred. We sloshed toward the entrance of the museum, shoulders hunched against the cold, and looked at the low-slung building. It was modern, sharp, and in some ways sterile, but it housed the museum and entrance to the cemetery itself. Gayle and I made our way through security and then walked downstairs. A short film clip speaking about some of the soldiers who died during the fighting rolled. We sat and listened, their names fading almost immediately. One man, however, was 32 when he left the British coast, gone to help heal the wounded. He died there, not far from where we sat, learning his story, and watching photos of him playing with his children flickered on the screen. I'm 33. Tears began to surface as the import of the place continued to swell within me. ...

In my Shakespeare class, I asked the students to pitch their dream version of the play we had just finished studying ( Macbeth ) as if they had all the resources and connections to make it happen. They selected their favorite actors, researched costume ideas, and digitally developed the way the stage would look. There were lots of different variations on Macbeth , including Breaking Bad meets Macbeth , French Revolution Macbeth , and a couple of Victorian London concepts as the setting for the Scottish play.* It was really cool, and the students did a fantastic job. But the one that really got me thinking was one in which a student framed the story of Scottish dynasties as actually one of the antebellum South. Instead of it being North versus South, however, it was the concept of a plantation owner (Duncan) whose favorite slave (Macbeth) helps quell an uprising on the plantation (the beginning of the play). Since the student was only sketching out the concept, there wasn't time ...

I am one of those people who, after 32 years of birthdays, still likes getting older. Well, I suppose I should clarify that: I love having a birthday. When I was about to turn 24, my first son was born. In fact, it was the day before my own birthday when he came into this world. In part because I was happy to be a dad, and in part because he almost didn't stay in the world for long, I enveloped Peter's birthday into my own. The one day's difference didn't bother me (even though, as a child, I secretly hated my younger brother for having a birthday in March), and I have always deeply enjoyed celebrating my son's birthday with my own. Part of my love of a birthday is from growing up. In a family of four kids, there were plenty of ways in which I could get attention from my parents, but I was always content to just kind of...be there. I didn't do a lot of sports, extra-curricular activities, or trouble. I was pretty content to cruise, rarely doing much out...

I've been troubled, of late, about what feels contradictory and confusing impulses. First, some preface: I'm currently reading Savoj Źiźek's Violence: Big Ideas/Small Book . It is fascinating, deep, and really easy to read (an absolute must for me, as my brain has atrophied more than I care to admit). It contains myriad comments about how we perceive violence, particularly the concept of the symbolism of it. I'm reading it not just for pleasure, but as another useful source for my long-delayed video game analysis. It will often wander down other theoretical and philosophical paths (with more than one unintentionally humorous rant against liberal communists who, from his point of view, simply aren't liberal--or communist--enough), so it's hard to really pin it down well. Nevertheless, it's getting me thinking about violence in general, and war in specific. That's what leads me to this post: War. My class has been slogging through the first half of the t...