[NON BLOG] Recent Readings
Mar. 17th, 2005 01:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldWhile heading west on the College Street streetcar with the intent of getting off just before Spadina to loot the Lillian H. Smith library for books offering advice on how to write fiction in keeping with my not-very-secret hopes, I turned and looked and saw the University of Toronto bookstore on the opposite north side of the street. They have a massive sale on, you see.
I had to go in. University book sales got me regularly during my academic career, whether at UPEI or at Queen's. How can you walk by a university bookstore with massively discounted items and not exit with at least one book that you've always wanted, holding the slightly yellowed pages in your hands and trying to peel off the residue of accumulated discount price tags as you stroll headless through the maddening crowd? Nostalgia for university was also a factor, back when things seemed so much simpler. In the end, I retrieved two books from the table of books discounted 75% off: Alon Confino's The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918, and Canadian playwright Brad Fraser's 1995 play Poor Superman.
Collective memory, particularly of nations, particularly from provincial perspectives, is a topic that interests me. Part of me wants to believe that there is such thing as an objective history, and that it can be accessed. That's the least skeptical and most idealistic part of me, though. I tend to be more pragmatic and more critical, and I'm very interested in the ways in which collective memory is shaped in ways which don't entirely conform with reality. Confino's history looks quite interesting. Württemburg, a constituent state of the German Reich under the Wirdebirch dynasty comparable to Bavaria and Saxony, was a relatively provincial area of Germany, outside of the dominant Kingdom of Prussia. It's arguably easy to imagine situations where Württemburg would have found itself outside of the emerging German nation-state. Confino describes the various ways in which German nationalists in Württemburg tried to stimulate the growth of a properly German consciousness, through public holidays, community museums, the power of the mass media. For German nationalists, the creation of the collective memory of a powerful and united Germany was essential. Nostalgia for a past that never existed was, for them, a necessity. We know now that the whole well-intentioned project turned out badly, likely almost as badly as it possibly could have turned out to be. Non-mythologized history has fewer malevolent consequences.
As for Brad Fraser, I remember reading in the mid-1990s a hostile reviewer in Maclean's who sneered that all his plays dealt with straight married men who got seduced by secure gay men, and the recent hostile reviews for his latest (Cold Meat Party) are legendary now. Just skimming through Poor Super Man, though, there's a certain crude immediacy that grabs me. There is artifice, but his characters know that they are partaking in this and generating more. The play seems to be conscious of its novelty; or, since I haven't read many plays lately, or ever ready much GLBT literature, perhaps I'm transposing my sensations of novelty onto the play. Regardless, I think I like it.
I've had a chance to skim those writing guides, incidentally. There may yet be some particularly useful bits, but on reflection and reading there are only bits. I have to admit that I've known what I've had to do for a while.
I had to go in. University book sales got me regularly during my academic career, whether at UPEI or at Queen's. How can you walk by a university bookstore with massively discounted items and not exit with at least one book that you've always wanted, holding the slightly yellowed pages in your hands and trying to peel off the residue of accumulated discount price tags as you stroll headless through the maddening crowd? Nostalgia for university was also a factor, back when things seemed so much simpler. In the end, I retrieved two books from the table of books discounted 75% off: Alon Confino's The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918, and Canadian playwright Brad Fraser's 1995 play Poor Superman.
Collective memory, particularly of nations, particularly from provincial perspectives, is a topic that interests me. Part of me wants to believe that there is such thing as an objective history, and that it can be accessed. That's the least skeptical and most idealistic part of me, though. I tend to be more pragmatic and more critical, and I'm very interested in the ways in which collective memory is shaped in ways which don't entirely conform with reality. Confino's history looks quite interesting. Württemburg, a constituent state of the German Reich under the Wirdebirch dynasty comparable to Bavaria and Saxony, was a relatively provincial area of Germany, outside of the dominant Kingdom of Prussia. It's arguably easy to imagine situations where Württemburg would have found itself outside of the emerging German nation-state. Confino describes the various ways in which German nationalists in Württemburg tried to stimulate the growth of a properly German consciousness, through public holidays, community museums, the power of the mass media. For German nationalists, the creation of the collective memory of a powerful and united Germany was essential. Nostalgia for a past that never existed was, for them, a necessity. We know now that the whole well-intentioned project turned out badly, likely almost as badly as it possibly could have turned out to be. Non-mythologized history has fewer malevolent consequences.
As for Brad Fraser, I remember reading in the mid-1990s a hostile reviewer in Maclean's who sneered that all his plays dealt with straight married men who got seduced by secure gay men, and the recent hostile reviews for his latest (Cold Meat Party) are legendary now. Just skimming through Poor Super Man, though, there's a certain crude immediacy that grabs me. There is artifice, but his characters know that they are partaking in this and generating more. The play seems to be conscious of its novelty; or, since I haven't read many plays lately, or ever ready much GLBT literature, perhaps I'm transposing my sensations of novelty onto the play. Regardless, I think I like it.
I've had a chance to skim those writing guides, incidentally. There may yet be some particularly useful bits, but on reflection and reading there are only bits. I have to admit that I've known what I've had to do for a while.
