#it's not an astounding point but i'd rather write these thoughts than make a post about 'what a good line' every joke is

[galacticlamps]

One more (accidentally long) post about The Highlanders for tonight, bc there were lots of little things I wanted to mention but some of them tie together anyway & I got interrupted while trying to watch it, too:

I really like how the story starts out with the perspective of the McLaren clan remnants fleeing the battlefield. It sucks a bit in reconstruction because they hardly have any dialogue, but they even get into a censor-cut-clip of Alexander killing a redcoat chasing them, all before we even see the Tardis team. I think it was a good choice just because it’s such a strange idea for an episode in some ways - it’s really a pretty comical historical, as things go, and it takes place directly after the battle of Culloden, with the narrative focused on sympathizing with the defeated Highlanders, and those aren’t two things I would’ve thought could be brought together very well, even in a time travel show that also once had a comedic episode about Nero burning down Rome.

Granted, I’m writing this as someone who knows that the next installments feature scenes like beating lawyers over the head and locking them in cupboards, the Doctor playing dress-up, and Houdini tricks saving people’s lives, but even in the course of the first episode, the flow from an atmosphere of seriousness to one of comedy is already underway, and for the most part I think the two are merged pretty cleverly (as soon as they’re in danger of being hanged, the Dr von Wer stuff starts up, for example)

But mostly, I was thinking about that juxtaposition today in relation to Kirsty, who I kinda don’t think I’ve ever paid enough attention to before, honestly, and I think that’s why this post turned out so long. A couple of lines that’ve always stuck out to me are when she & Polly see the troops getting ready to hang their friends, and Kirsty says “we can but mourn” causing Polly to go “well crying’s no good” before she suggests they try leading the troops off - and they stuck out to me not because they’re particularly representative of each of their characters, even, but because I think that might be the simplest example of where The Highlanders gets its drive from, as a story.

Like, Kirsty’s sensible - she’s the one who notices they captured a doctor, and begs Alexander to let him treat their father, she’s even willing to bargain that they can kill him and his friends later, if it’s any help. After that, she’s reluctant to leave him, but when the Doctor points out they need water and says he’ll send Polly with her to even out the numbers, she agrees. It’s framed as a cliffhanger right now, but at the end of the episode she decided that this weird, oddly-dressed, and woefully ignorant woman (who’s just insulted her) is going to get lost and injured in the dark so she warns her against it, and then tries to help her when that fails. She’s really quite capable of being level-headed. She also isn’t squeamish, or cowardly, and when Polly balks at her way of doing things - in this episode, the cattle raids specifically, she isn’t - well, cowed, if I’m allowed the pun - she (quite correctly) looks at Polly as the one who’s strange and out-of-place here. Polly’s supposed to be written as a ‘modern woman’ who can inspire action in a historical ‘traditional’ one, but Kirsty’s too busy being a highlander in the wake of culloden to be all impressed by that, so we’re spared any of those “aw gee you’re awfully outspoken for a woman, I wish I could be brave like you” -type moments you get in some other cases where the show uses that dynamic, even to a good end - like when Sarah Jane tells the queen of Peladon about women’s lib, for instance.

And yet Polly’s ideas do help, but it’s not because she’s so much more progressive than Kirsty - she just happens to be exactly what Kirsty needs right now, and what the whole setting needs from the Tardis crew, if they’re gonna pull off the story they’re attempting to tell.

The Battle of Culloden isn’t exactly known for being a great, clean, easy fight, and while it might be famously on the short side (which is even referenced within this same episode) it was far from being one sudden horrible event that came out of the blue - historically, the lead-up over the last 24 hours would’ve been a pretty grueling and exhausting ordeal for those involved on the Jacobite side, and while I don’t recall The Highlanders ever making explicit reference to those particulars, it does convey an atmosphere of hopelessness and defeat pretty thoroughly. In this episode Colin has lines about ‘all the men’ of their clan lying dead in the mud, how he should be with them, and later on in the story he’ll talk about being content to die on the Anabel if only he could see his daughter one last time. When Alexander snaps at Jamie for making noise with his chanter, Jamie tells him the redcoats’ll be there soon enough to matter what they do, and on the scaffold he’s ready to be hanged with his Laird unless Grey agrees to take both of them. Even Alexander, who seems the most spirited of the highlanders we meet in this episode, doesn’t seem capable of setting his goals any higher than going down fighting, rather than being hanged, and since that’s exactly what kills him it doesn’t read as a particularly wise or noble hope to hold. None of them have given up, mind, but they’re in an incredibly defeated mindset, and in comparison Kirsty’s attempts to help her father really make her the more practical and proactive of the bunch. She’s well aware that “crying’s no good,” but at the point when Polly says that to her, she’s well past believing there’s any good left that she can accomplish.

In reality,  it’s Polly’s optimism that’s irrational - and while the Doctor’s not there to call her naive, he’s just done it with Ben (’you’ll have every english soldier within miles’ - ‘well what’s wrong with that?’ - ‘whats- you should’ve paid more attention to your history books ben’), and Polly’s similar faith in the English soldiers (would everyone in 1966 be so confident that the Hanoverian army wasn’t allowed to hang prisoners without the officer present? I’ve always wondered about that line, to me it makes her seem both oddly well-informed and at the same time more foolish) directly parallels Ben’s stance, and we know how quickly that comes back to bite him, since the soldiers proceed to go ahead and try hanging him too.

As a tv show, that’s where the Dr von Wer stuff needs to come in, to lighten the mood with a silly voice and some snappy one-liners, but in-universe, that’s also the reason that Kirsty needs somebody like Polly -  someone who doesn’t belong, and whose actions don’t really make sense. Someone who’s just been dropped here without the baggage and defeat of everything that came before, someone to whom this is a sudden bad turn of events and not the end of a long hard struggle (to say nothing of someone awake and alert) to whom giving up now would feel like not trying at all, rather than already having given it everything they’ve got. If Polly were actually in Kirsty’s position, she might not’ve been able to do much more than mourn either, but Polly standing next to Kirsty with a totally different (and frankly, flawed) perspective on things is able to make the suggestions that are past care or belief at that point, which is a character dynamic worth watching, and probably why having the Tardis team being comedic despite their dismal circumstances is the only way to coax action out of them that can drive a narrative forward.

It doesn’t land Polly in a particularly good light - a character nicknamed ‘the Dutchess’ yelling “you’re just a stupid peasant” at the woman who just brought her shelter and offered her food (which she scoffed at) and then marching out into the night claiming she’ll save the day only to immediately need rescuing from that same woman herself never will look all that good - but it does do a lot to show how out-of-her-element Polly is, and how it’s not a case of her Being From The Future making her better than Kirsty, but rather a case of her just being Something Different allowing her to suggest certain things that Kirsty can’t imagine doing right now, but is plenty capable of helping her with once they have made the plan.

I don’t even think I have any grand point I’m trying to arrive at here, I just kept noticing how the tragedy is used to set the scene in this episode but the action has to pushed on more by comedy, whether it takes the form of actual jokes or the inherent ‘hilarity’ of putting things together that just don’t belong - probably because setting the episode in the wake of the battle, it’s such a defeated, inevitable brand of tragedy, too - Alexander dies and the show barely stops to acknowledge it because of course he did, what else could’ve happened, and now everyone else is about to die too. The attitude is almost that the characters might as well try some ridiculous ways out of their situations because all the normal things are hopeless, and once you’ve accepted that what else have you got to lose? I think it does a good job of picking out the differences between its characters rather than their similarities, and since the Doctor’s behavior in the later episodes gets described as morally gray a lot, I think it’s kind of important how in this episode, neither Polly or Kirsty’s approaches are painted as being totally right, they’re just different, but that’s also a good thing, because neither of them is gonna get anywhere on their own.

[sonjaohno]

Democracy in America

Hello dear friends and family,

October is off to a crisp start and I've been busy squirreling away at the library. It's already been one month since I arrived, which makes it high time for some reflection. I've been working hard to come up with clever answers to the question of "what my impressions are" mainly because (and a list of so-called impressions follows):

I thought Finns were insecure, with their country branding workshops and whatnot, perennially worried about what other people (read: the Swedes) think of us, but I can tell you, Americans are worse. In all the years I've lived in Berlin, not once has a German person (nor a Berliner—these are two completely distinct groups of people) asked me to tell them what I "think" about their country, or what my "impressions" are. Maybe they know better than to ask. Maybe they really don't care. Americans, on the other hand (including New Yorkers, though a similar non-equivalence exists here), cannot get enough of foreigners' interpretations of their country. I think it's because they genuinely don't know what to think about their country themselves and are waiting for somebody to tell them what the hell is going on here. So, what are my impressions so far?

America is home to some really great things. So far, my top three list is i) cinnamon-flavored chewing gum ii) hazelnut-flavored filter coffee (a mystery but a delightful one) iii) pecan-pumpkin-spice-flavored filter coffee (again, I don't know who came up with this or what they do to make coffee taste like a Hallmark card but I fuckin love it) iv) ditto, snickerdoodles (both the word and the pastry). Oops, that's four.

There is, however, clearly something wrong with a country that has to keep toothpaste under lock and key at the drugstore. I mean, toothpaste is expensive here—$5.99 for a tube, are you kidding me?—but it's still not exactly a luxury item. I literally have to ring a bell at Duane Reed to get an employee to open the toothpaste safe for a tube of Colgate. I wondered about this out loud to a New Yorker, who told me it's because the Duane Reed I went to is located at a "minor transportation hub," in the corner of W 110th and Broadway, which presumably means that this ludicrously wealthy Upper West Side drugstore frequented mostly by Columbia students and faculty is some kind of a crime hotspot. I should probably start carrying a gun.

Americans are loud. I feel like shushing people all the time, which makes me feel like a bad person. If anyone asked me to, I'd be more than happy to provide instructions for adjusting the volume of one's speech to different situations. It'd go something like follows: i) When outdoors, use what you would consider an "indoors voice." ii) When indoors, use what you would consider a "library voice." iii) When in the library, shut the fuck up. Pretty simple, huh?

The American economy would collapse if people stopped living on takeaway meals and coffees. I have never seen people so comfortable dishing out $20-50 per day for food they don't like and coffee they don't need. I mean, I'm not even able to get out of bed without several cups of coffee in the morning but I'd find it really hard to justify a $10 daily budget for iced-mocha-swirly lattes and another $10 for dumplings, when you can just pack a sandwich. The number of students able to afford this kind of lifestyle is just astounding. (This is Columbia, I am aware that the people without trust funds constitute a minority.) I feel positively frugal with my leftover lunches and thermos bottle of coffee (this week it's Donut Shop Roast, which disappointingly does not taste like donuts).

Americans like to think of themselves as libertarians and are famously opposed to state-imposed regulation—but I've never felt as regulated and rule-bound as I have here. It's just that the rules aren't handed down by government officials but by the various enterprises, including private businesses and universities (the latter is included in the former but deserves a honorary mention of its own), who would rather impose elaborate codes of conduct than leave people to their common senses and be sued when something inevitably happens. As one particularly pointless example, I have to complete an online covid-symptom checklist every morning before I'm allowed to enter campus—a "Daily Attestation," it's called—where I solemnly swear that I did not have a cough or a sore throat that morning, either. The only conceivable purpose of this useless exercise is to ensure that if somebody does show up on campus sneezing and wheezing their viral particles around, Columbia can't sued for not having done everything in its power to prevent the virus from spreading. Airing out rooms, though, is strictly out of the question—presumably because it's against some other rule designed to stop students from committing suicide by jumping out a third-floor window. As a person who is physiologically unable to follow pointless rules, I find this kind of self-serving, counter-logical box ticking absolutely infuriating.

It's not all bad, though. Yesterday I went to a Japanese jazz speakeasy around Midtown. We had to stand in line for about an hour, between a group of 17-year-old musical theater majors and 27-year-old jazz enthusiasts. The former were bursting out in spontaneous, perfectly synchronized song every few minutes, the latter were debating scales or keys or some such—I'm telling you, it was like walking into a badly-written scene of Glee. It was worth it though. At one point, during a several-minute-long drum solo, I experienced what can only be described as a moment of pure transcendence. People were all around me were yelling over the music and gesticulating wildly and, for a few seconds, time compressed to something graspable; a thing crackling with energy. An oceanic feeling is, in the words of turn-of-the-century mystic Romain Rolland, “a spontaneous … feeling of the ‘eternal’ (which can very well not be eternal, but simply without perceptible limits, and like oceanic, as it were).” If eternity can be found in a midtown basement, Manhattan can’t be all bad. (Below a video clip I took discreetly when entering.)

P.s. A friend of mine said that I should write an Alexis de Tocqueville -type report about my time in America, which explains the title of this post. For the literary agents and non-fiction editors reading this blog (jk, apparently it's my mum and three of her friends who read these entries—hi!!!), you can email me at sonjaohno at gmail dot com for a book deal.

[qqueenofhades]

Hello! I have been a huge history nerd for most of my life and recently decided i would like to pursue history as a possible career, by I've recently been discouraged. I've had career counselors at my school and my parents and friends say that I should look to other careers because history simply isn't a lucrative job. I'd really like to know your thoughts since you're a historian. Btw I really look up to you and love your blog! So, thoughts on careers/colleges and the sort?

Aww, haha. You are sweet.

First, I will caveat at the outset that academia is a stressful and often stupid profession, nor is it, indeed, very lucrative. Nobody gets into it because they are expecting to make it rain, or because they enjoy not being constantly in doubt about their future/how things are going to string together/where they are going to end up next/if they will possibly have a full-time job by the time they are in their mid-thirties/etc. For example, I finish my PhD next summer, at which point I will need to immediately start applying for either postdoctoral fellowships, or see if I’m lucky enough to stumble upon that one junior lecturer/assistant research position that wants my exact research interests. Postdoc fellowships could be anywhere from three months to three years. Visiting/junior lectureships are usually for a contract of one or two years. You can string any number of these together (if you’re lucky) until/if you get a permanent position somewhere. This could also and probably will involve moving every year or two, so you don’t really get to settle down for a while. You will have to keep up your career/participation in academia, work to publish papers/go to conferences etc, while also paying the bills somehow. Sometimes the right opportunity falls into your lap, sometimes it doesn’t. You just have to keep grinding and hope that it does.

(And no, the pay is not anything to aspire to. I’m currently junior/doctoral student faculty in the department, teaching one class a semester, and yeah. It’s better if you’re salaried or getting a stipend, and I’m lucky enough to have my full tuition fees paid by scholarship. So if you want to be rich, this is not the job for you. But as ever, it improves as you go, and if you get a permanent position, you will be paid at least enough to live on. So we’re not talking cardboard-box-under-a-bridge levels of poverty.)

If that hasn’t scared you off, then we can go on to what I regard as the most important part. I’m always of the opinion that life is way too short to be doing anything other than what you love and are good at, and if you deliberately pick something you don’t like and don’t have passion for, on the expectation that it will make you money… well, that’s one way to live, and I’m sure people do well for themselves by it. But it sounds exhausting, horrible, and eventually soul-crushing to me, and which is why, despite all the clearly enunciated drawbacks listed above, I’d still rather be doing this than anything else. You don’t get to final-year PhD status (and the clutches of incipient insanity, but never mind that) without really loving it, and I do. I stumbled a bit ass backwardly into doing it as a career, but it really gives me a rush and an enjoyment and a delight which I have to hang onto during the hard sloggy bits or no-money bits or the “oh god it’s 11pm and I’ve been working on my thesis for the last ten hours” bits. And part of that is because in my view, in this current world, historians are more fucking important than ever, and this work really, really matters.

We’ve all remarked upon the way “historical accuracy” is used to justify bad treatment of women in period dramas, or the way narratives of an imagined medieval past are used by right-wing nationalists, or how “that’s totally medieval” is used as a synonym for something barbaric, etc. I always like to say that it astounds me how much people are totally confident they know what the medieval era was like, despite never having learned a thing about it. I’m also a medievalist of the generation that is pushing back and deconstructing medieval history’s previous reputation as a safe place for straight, white, Christian men to write a straight, white, Christian man’s history. I just got the syllabus the other day for the class I’m teaching in the spring semester, and I was totally delighted, because it’s basically the class I would have designed myself. It’s about medieval narratives in the modern world, and touches upon (among other things) the relevance/use of the crusades in the “war on terror,” the treatment of women in medieval fantasy dramas (a la Game of Thrones), the connection to right-wing nationalism and claimed histories and etc – all subjects on which I have written and thought about a lot and also posted about frequently on here. So yes, I can teach the shit out of that class, and trust me, it’s a good feeling when you can walk into work every day and know that you are doing something, however you can, about the terrifying and idiotic shitstorm that is the world right now. You are teaching people how to think about and identify these things and push back on them, and they in turn will teach other people how to do it. It’s an awfully small step, but we have to start somewhere.

History as a career also requires a major educational commitment – 4 years for a bachelor’s degree, 2 years for a master’s, and at least 3 for a PhD. That’s almost ten years at the minimum, assuming you have the means to study full time, and it will involve a lot of writing; I wrote a senior thesis (25 pages/10k words), a master’s thesis (60 pages/20k words), and I’m now working on a doctoral dissertation (~270 pages/100k words), after going through a program that emphasized writing, so I was doing 25-30 page papers for every class as an undergraduate. Especially as you move into postgraduate level, you have to be good about motivating yourself, because your time will be less structured. It is up to you to be the one to make it count, and you will also have to have a memory or at least the capability to use something to remember tons of tiny details. It will involve a lot of close reading of obscure texts, and probably language learning (in my case it’s been Latin and French, also Latin is terrible and nobody likes it and if I was smart, I would have avoided it, but hey). You will also have to have a thick hide, both for constructive criticism and for the constant rejection that comes with it. You will not get positions or university offers or scholarships or awards that you really, really wanted, and it takes a certain resilience to be able to move past that and not let it reflect personally on you and your abilities. It does, however, happen to everyone, so at least we can swallow the bitter Moral of the Story pill together?

Overall, my assessment is that we badly need more intelligent, trained, socially aware, and intersectional historians, and if you want to do it, the constant “but it’s not lucrative!!!” protests shouldn’t put you off. As I said above, it’s a serious commitment, it’s weird and stressful and work-intensive, and if you can see yourself being happy in any other career, you should probably do that instead. Doing something academically and professionally isn’t the same as doing it as a hobby, of course, but it does start with a love of the subject and the ability to see yourself doing it intensively and long-term, and as I said, I just feel like life’s far too short to pick something you only think will make you rich (since if you hate it, that’s years of your life you can’t get back, and it might not work out anyway). 

I’m always happy to answer questions to the best of my ability, if you want to drop back in. And happy historinerding.