Still nothing fascinating going on
I was logged on here to delete the latest spam comments and I figured I might as well post, since it’s been almost a week since the last one. Life has just been completely devoid of things worth writing. Even the laundry room has been in perfect working order. Nothing to complain about. Nothing new, really. I’ve taken approximately zero interesting pictures lately.
On Friday, I did go to a museum exhibit that my Analysis of Texts professor had recommended on the last day of class, since I had nothing better to do. It was titled “Controversies,” and I’d actually seen ads for it around the train station and such, but it didn’t look that interesting. Turns out it was, well, probably worth the €5,00 student admission, but not the most exciting thing in the world. About 100 pictures, I think, maybe less. A lot of the “controversy” was just copyright disputes, which is interesting to think about — especially the early bits when photography was emerging as an art form in the late 1800s — but gets repetitive after a while. There were too many variations on the “possibly sexually suggestive images of minors” thing, which is basically the same story every time; a lot of “was this photograph staged?” ones from various conflicts, and some interesting cases of censorship (Is there a guy in this photograph with Stalin whom Stalin doesn’t like anymore? Erase him! –and– Is that a French cop standing by while those Nazis go around doing their thing? Get rid of his cap, nobody will know he’s a cop!). Other than that, the usual stuff — a Robert Mapplethorpe, a picture from Abu Ghraib, the last picture taken by paparazzi of Princess Diana, that one with the starving kid and the vulture — all with their own attendant Issues To Consider but nothing terribly original. Some interesting stuff about the different standards used to judge things in different countries. And one picture from 9/11 of a dismembered hand lying on the sidewalk amid rubble and a melted Hershey bar. Apparently the Daily News published it shortly after the fact. Hey, they do that, not exactly a classy paper. A few years removed, of course, and it doesn’t really have that visceral impact anymore. Probably because it is so shockingly surreal. At this point, the emotional impact of 9/11 is mostly about triggering memories of the event, and not too many people actually saw a dismembered hand on the sidewalk, so I can’t see it would have the same impact as actual images of the towers and so on.
At any rate, suffice to say that the exhibition was interesting, but mainly from an academic/historical standpoint. I’d sort of expected to be somewhat more moved. But then the professor who recommended it is a bit of an odd one (aren’t they all?). The last few texts we analyzed, she kept on telling us to “Feel it! Don’t think, feel!” Which is very nice if you want to make-believe you’re being taught by Yoda or whatever, but of absolutely no value when you’re analyzing a text in a foreign language. As she’d even stated on the first or second day of class, connotations and allusions and all that can be very culturally specific. In order to “feel” a text, you first need to make sure you’re working with the same basic vocabulary. And anyway she went back and forth between telling us to “feel” the excerpt from Rimbaud, and berating us for not grasping the precise difference between dawn and aurora (apparently one of them’s white light, the other is red). So yeah.
