I just wanted to draw readers’ attention to this UMKC website. I have some thoughts about the site, but will refrain from sharing them, for now, except to wonder if they might have chosen a different preposition in the title.
My questions:
In my early British literature course, students are responsible for group presentations. Today was our last day discussing Paradise Lost, and the students decided to stage an O’Reilly Factor panel discussion featuring Satan and Adam as panelists. The only thing I know about this show is from the spoofs of it that have appeared on Saturday Night Live, but I can say that the presentation was easily one of the best all semester, in part because the format allowed them to emphasize that at the heart of Milton’s epic is a question: who’s to blame for why the world is in such a sorry state?
O’Reilly set the stage for the debate, and then asked pointed questions of both characters. When Satan would try to weasel out of his responsibility for the fall, O’Reilly would remind him that this was the “No Spin Zone.” Other students in the class then took on the role of “callers” to the show, asking questions of the panelists. It went very well.
What’s that? Oh, yeah. My work. Let’s see. This past week I submitted an application for a grant to cover travel expenses to England this summer. I’m planning to do some research that will go a long way towards turning my dissertation — on eighteenth-century Methodism, print culture, and oratory — into a book. The Methodists were uncanny in their exploitation of the print medium, and I’d like to uncover unexamined details about how they produced and distributed their printed material. Also, I’m still trying to work out exactly the contours of their preaching, for which they earned from their contemporaries a reputation as fanatics. My hunch is that they didn’t deserve this reputation, but that something interesting is going on with their oral practice. From the application:
The worldÃs largest collection of rare printed and manuscript materials related to eighteenth-century British Methodism is kept at the Methodist Archives and Research Centre (MARC), located at John Rylands University Library (JRUL) at the University of Manchester in England. The MARC is generally considered one of the most valuable repositories of primary materials in the world for evangelical studies. Most importantly for my purposes, the MARC has singularly important personal papers of not only the founders of Methodism, John and Charles Wesley, but also the personal papers of many prominent Methodist laypeople of this period as well as detailed administrative records of the Methodist Conference, the national policymaking body of the Methodist Church of England, Wales and Scotland. The vast majority of this material is unavailable in printed form or in microfilm collections; research at the MARC is thus the only avenue of access to this material.
I didn’t write this part into the grant application, but depending on the timing of my trip, I might even be able to catch a Radiohead show. Alas, all sold out.
I’ve been thinking about the personal effects of war, lately, and even the effects of millitary life in general upon a family. For the first 18 years of my life I lived on or near military posts, moving about every three years. My dad had a 30-year career in the army, serving twice in Vietnam. My sister was born during his first tour of duty, and my dad heard about it in the field over one of those hand-crank radios you see on M*A*S*H. Okay, maybe I’m embellishing the radio part.
When I was 1, during his second tour of duty, we flew to Honolulu to be with him while he enjoyed a little leave time from the war. I have individual pictures of the four of us sitting on the beach in our bathing suits. Not a group picture, mind you. Each of us is pictured separately. My dad is pale, looking off into the distance, and appears to weigh about 98 pounds. My mom, wearing Jackie O sunglasses, looks at the camera, unsmiling. My sister and I are each digging in the sand. What kind of a vacation is that? How do you “relax” when you know that one of you is going back to a war where a great many people are dying? My parents don’t look particularly unhappy, just preoccupied. What must the flight back have been like for my mom?
My Uncle Mike also fought in Vietnam, but while my father escaped serious injury, though he did come home with a Purple Heart medal, my uncle was almost killed. In fact, my uncle was being flown back from Vietnam at the same time my dad was flying over for his second tour of duty. I can only imagine what that must have been like for my grandmother: one son on the way home with life-threatening injuries while another son is sent back into battle.
One of my earliest memories is hearing machine gun fire while sitting at the breakfast table in my grandparents’ house in Columbus, Georgia, just off-post from Fort Benning. It turned out that someone in the neighborhood had just lost it and needed to let off a little steam. As I think abou
t this event now, the weird thing is that to my young mind this event didn’t seem all that frightening. Unusual, to be sure, but not scary. I can’t understand why this would be.
I was about to write, “It’s not like machine guns or violence were a regular part of my life,” by which I meant that I did not hear machine gun fire regularly nor was ever a victim of violence. But really, for most of my childhood I was surrounded by weapons and thus violence. None were allowed in the house, mind you, but handguns, rifles, grenades, helicopters, tanks, and fighter jets were as regular a part of growing up for me as comic books and chewing gum. It’s easy to forget, perhaps, the tensions of the Cold War now, but as a kid, whenever I heard jets overhead, and this was not altogether infrequent, I thought, “Is this it?”
When your father — or mother, I assume — is in the military, it’s not like other jobs, where the nature of the employer doesn’t really matter. There’s a reason for the term “military family.” While it never felt oppressive to me, the army permeated family life while I was growing up. When we lived on post at Fort Benning, Georgia for example, each home in our neighborhood had a plaque on the front with not only the name of the officer who lived there, but also his rank. The crossing guards who stopped traffic when I walked to school wore uniforms and carried handguns. Fourth of July celebrations featured tanks and marching soldiers. When we lived at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, every day at five, when the post flag was lowered, no matter where you were or what you were doing, you stopped and put your hand over your heart. Traffic, soccer games, pedestrians, swimming, and anything else came to a halt for the few minutes this ceremony took. Before every movie was shown in the theater, you stood while the national anthem played over a short film of vaguely patriotic images. At the age of ten, every child is issued a military I.D. card. C
oming on post, you show your I.D. card to the armed guards at the entrance. You buy your groceries at the commissary. You get health care from military doctors. You sometimes attend Department of Defense schools, depending on how large the post is. You are, to borrow a current phrase, embedded in the military.
So one might think that this kind of full and not unpleasant immersion in military life — for 18 years of my life and 30 years of my parents’ — would result in some pro-military bias. And yet, I was never pressured to go into the military. I didn’t feel that strongly about it one way or the other. Guns, even toy guns, were not allowed in our house, as I said. Most amazingly, when I turned down a full, four-year Air Force ROTC scholarship to Georgia Tech, meaning my parents would have to pay for most of my college education themselves instead of having to pay for absolutely none of it, they didn’t say one word to talk me out of my decision. Not at the time, and not once since then. It makes me wonder if, for all the pride I know my parents’ felt in my father’s military career, they knew more than I or my sister did about the personal costs of a life in the military, a life that, as we are all too aware now, includes the possibility of combat.
If you’re wondering what the surround sound that comes with a probably expensive home theater system sounds like to your apartment building neighbors when they are, perhaps, at home on a Saturday trying to grade assignment from their undergraduate English classes, I think I can help you out. Herewith are the great variety of sonic wonders generated by such a system:
Who wouldn’t want to spend thousands of hard earned dollars to experience such a rewarding auditory paradise?
Update: