Micro-Fiction #1

 

An icy cold breeze blows across my face. With it I could hear the distant howl of the gust, the blowing of branches, the rustling of leaves hanging on to their trees by the smallest of threads. The leaves, carried this way and that, crashed into one another as the wind howled again. Some lost their battle and began to dance with the wind, swirling as they slowly descended then rose, riding another small gust across the winter’s sky. Upon the darkened road they fell, each with a delightful crunch. The trees swayed, seeming to try and catch their missing pieces. More and more broke free, or perhaps were stolen, from their brown-limbed roots. As the sound intensified, it almost sounded of rain, so many were falling. I closed my eyes and wondered, ‘does the falling leaf hate the wind or is this the only time it truly feels alive?’ I listened for a while, I cannot say for how long, the rustle taking on a musical quality, rising and falling like an operatic sonata on each gust, large and small, until, as if coming to a crescendo, a gale cracks a distant branch sending a near deafening note into the night sky.  At that, my eyes snap open. Instinctively, my head whips in the direction of the noise. In doing so, I catch a glimpse of a pale white light overhead. I had only a moment to process, not nearly enough time to reconstruct my own demise, such as it was, but I already knew: my doom had come. Eyes dilating, I am overwhelmed with a blinding pain across my entire body. Muscles contract and spasm, my jaw snaps on its own. In a flash, I have lost all faculties… the beast has taken over.

On an Unforgettable Quote

First, a bit of background...[1]

On the banks of the Volga River sat a bustling factory town called Stalingrad. It was 14 September 1942 and the Nazis were beginning to force their way into the city. The commander in charge of the defense of the city was Lieutenant General Vasiliy Chuikov, who had only received this charge (command of the 62^nd Army) two days prior.

By 1PM (1300) the Germans had taken the Mamaev Kurgan, the large hill on the edge of the city center that overlooked the entirety of Stalingrad, and had begun their increasingly brutal attack on the city. With their improved vantage point, the German forces were able to correct their artillery targeting and aerial bombardment to devastating effect.

Before the taking of the Kurgan was complete, an order went out that the 13^th Guards Rifle Division, led by General Alexander Rodimtsev, was to cross the Volga and aid in the counter-attack against the Kurgan and that Rodimtsev, himself, was to report directly to Chuikov at 2PM (1400). Rodimtsev crossed the Volga with only a handful of subordinates in broad daylight, multiple times having to dive into trenches and bomb craters to avoid the shelling, hours before any of his Guards RD were able to cross and join the fight.

Alexander Rodimtsev arrived, covered from head to toe in every manner of dirt, mud, and grime, to General Chuikov’s command center shortly before 2PM prompting this exchange:

Gen. Chuikov began, half jokingly, “Comrade General, do you normally present yourself for duty in such condition?”

To which Gen. Rodimtsev replied, “Fuck your mother, comrade commander!”

This is easily my favorite war-time quote of all time and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I do. We, in America, do not often get to hear these eastern front anecdotes, and, in fact, this was not written in English until 2007. I, as a history lover, am glad that the whole world is starting to get on the same page about recording and studying the histories of all nations from a non-jingoistic point of view so that we can truly understand what has brought us to where we are.

Всего хорошего.

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[1] David M. Glantz, Armageddon in Stalingrad: September- November 1942, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 112-120.

Michael K. Jones, Stalingrad: How the Red Army Survived the German Onslaught, (Drexel Hill: Casemate, 2007), 103-107.

On Hope and Despair

In my first post, On Language, for the sake of time I allowed myself to ignore the semantic difference between the words “object” and “symbol.” Here, though, I am forced to introduce the idea because much of the discussion revolves around the idea of “symbol” as the representation of a thing and “object” as the concrete thing in itself.

“What is frequently appreciated in many so-called symbols is exactly their vagueness, their openness, their fruitful ineffectiveness to express a ‘final’ meaning, so that with symbols and by symbols one indicates what is always beyond one’s reach.”[1]

For instance, a symbolic gesture does not attempt to get an immediate concrete effect much like a symbol may not even reflect a concrete object. But this is understood to mean that while they may themselves be abstractions, it is still likely that a symbol can be extrapolated to within the realm of concrete objects. In other words, a symbol can represent an abstract idea which, in turn, has attached itself to a very concrete object. An example of this could be Brick Tamland’s “I love lamp.” The very abstract symbol of his feeling of love is representative not of a vague abstraction but simply of the physical object of the lamp. Hence, the lamp can be seen, or at least interpreted, as the concrete symbol of his abstract love.

And here is where I can begin my discussion of hope. Hope is another fairly abstract feeling: one of expectation or desire. Hope is almost always seen as a positive part of the human psyche, just don’t tell Red.[2] Despair, on the other hand, is more of an ethereal concept, rather than a kind of “thing,” so to speak. I say this because despair, like darkness or cold, is defined not in and of itself but as simply the absence of something else, in this case, obviously, hope.

An internal discussion that I have been having for a few days now started with the question: Is it healthy to attach the entirety of one’s hope onto an abstraction or, in my specific case, an abstraction... of an abstraction bound to a physical, and wholly concrete, object? Meaning: hope through the lens of the potential, as the first abstraction, of a second abstraction, which I will not explain at this time, based on the object. And while the answer to this question may vary widely from person to person, with the eternal optimist arguing that one should always find hope in anything they can find and the pessimist arguing that all hope is inevitably futile, my own answer, based on my pseudo-positivistic outlook, would probably be no - it is not healthy.

However, if an incident occurs that causes the hope to be shattered, which it recently has, one cannot help but find themselves grasping at straws in order to not fall into an abyss of despair. In fighting this, probably inevitable, despair, I have taken a bit of solace in the fact that I was able to entangle myself in another, albeit very similar, question: is it better to have had that one glimmer of hope and lost it or to never have had hope at all?

I will ponder this question as I desperately search for something to fill the void or even, perhaps, somehow, someway, try to rekindle that hope I once had.

But, I suppose we will only truly know the answer to that question if I can somehow find myself sanding an old boat... on the beach... in Zihuatanejo.

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[1] Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 130.

[2] “Hope is a dangerous thing.” Ellis Boyd Redding

On Turabian

The Turabian, or Chicago, style of citation is the style that is used in all university level history courses in the U.S. that have academic integrity and in many publishing firms. The other two most popular styles, and in fact both are more popular than Turabian, are APA, or American Psychological Association, and MLA, or Modern Language Association, which is the oldest (founded 1883). This piece is going to compare these styles in terms of bibliographic, footnote/ endnote, and in text citations.^*

First up is the Turabian bibliographic citation style:^**

Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, London: Yale University Press, 2004.

Notice how it has all of the information that you would want to know about the book used and is presented in an order that gives the reader the two most important parts of the citation first.

Next is the APA style:

Allison, H. E., (2004). Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense. London: Yale University Press.

This is presented in a very similar way but leaves a bit to be desired. Notice how the author’s name is abbreviated and they give the year of publication even before the title of the book. The importance given to the year of publication is something that will be discussed in more detail later.

Finally, the MLA style:

Allison, Henry. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. London: Yale, 2004. Print.

This style is simply the bare bones of citation and is of little use to anyone currently writing in the academic sphere. Notice that the subtitle is missing and the publisher is almost abbreviated.

In all, the bibliographic citation styles have evolved over time to include more information and have reached a point where they include mostly the same information, just in a different order.

Moving on the in text citations, we will look at Turabian first.

‘To truly understand the inner workings of the mind one needs to understand that human cognition is discursive, in what Henry Allison calls the “Discursivity Thesis.”[1]’

Here we have an example sentence that introduces an un-original idea and gives a brief recognition to the original author and a footnote number for further information. Very simple.

The APA example would read:

‘To truly understand the inner workings of the mind one needs to understand that human cognition is discursive, in what Henry Allison (2004) calls the “Discursivity Thesis.”[2]’

Also fairly straight forward but awkwardly places the year of publication in the middle of the sentence, directly after the author’s name. Here we find that the APA style has a sort of fixation on the year of publication. My best guess, as for the cause of this, would be that it is most important to be current. Perhaps even at the expense of being correct? I really do not know. However, the style is not as simple, and can become downright cumbersome to a reader when citing multiple sources in one sentence.^***

The MLA example is:

‘To truly understand the inner workings of the mind one needs to understand that human cognition is discursive, in what Henry Allison calls the “Discursivity Thesis.”

There is no necessary citation as far as I am able to understand it. I am fairly certain that you do not even need to have Allison’s name on there. In a word, useless.

On to footnote/ endnote citations and here is where it becomes very different.

First up again is Turabian:

Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, An Interpretation and Defense: Revised and Enlarged Edition (London: Yale University Press, 2004), 13.

Here is all of the information that a reader may want from a footnote: author, book, publisher, year, and page. If there is any question about the quote the reader can easily find exactly where in the original text the information comes from. This is also the minimum amount of information that is acceptable style. In other words, it is perfect.

Next we will look at APA:

See Allison (2004) for his discussion of Idealism.

That is pitiful. We receive no further information than what the sentence itself provides. One could, of course, say more but the point is to show the minimum amount of information that is considered acceptable footnote style.

Finally we will look at MLA:

See Allison about the defense of Kant, especially chapters 1 and 2.

This is better, but still not very good. There is only slightly more information about where the original content came from.

All things considered, it is clear that the Turabian/ Chicago style is the best of the citation styles. The reader gets more thorough information from each type of citation, and in an immensely more readable form (considering the multi-cite example from APA).

So do both yourself and your reader justice and use the Turabian style.

^* I am getting my information on Turabian from Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers, 7th ed., ed. Wayne C. Booth et al. (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2007. The information for APA and MLA are coming from the Purdue Owl websites.

^** All in-text example citations are coming from an essay I wrote for a European Intellectual History course.

^***A made up example would read, “According to Marshall (2001), Jones (2009), and Charles (2011), the work of Smith (1990) can be discounted because he relied too heavily on the work of Baker (1982).” That is awful.

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On Shit

Everyone has heard of the term “shit on” to refer to some sort of criticism, be it right or wrong. Whether it is a reporter “shitting on” a player for a poor performance or a commentator “shitting on” Todd Akin for being a dumbass, I am sure that we are all very familiar with the concept.

Now then, I would like to discuss a comparison of “shitting on” someone/something vs. “taking a shit on” something. While they both, ostensibly, mean the same thing, it appears saying that someone “shit on” you, or you had heard that someone was “shitting on” you (or your loved ones, for that matter) just does not seem as bad as if you had heard someone “took a shit” on you or your loved ones. This may be because the simple addition of the word ‘take’ brings with it the idea of the physical action of actually “taking a shit on” something, and conjures images of some hardcore German Scheisse videos, as opposed to something having already been shit on where you can detach yourself from the action that would needed to have taken place for the shit to be there in the first place.

I must admit that I am very partial to the second version of the phrase. I do not know if it is because you hear this alternate version so infrequently, or that I am just a sick, twisted individual, but I much prefer the sentence ‘Bill O’Reilly took a shit on Obama’s economic plan’ to ‘O’Reilly shit on the president’s economic plan.’

I would really like to hear your thoughts on the subject: so leave a comment or contact me. Maybe I will take a vote… just go ahead and let me know, if I get more than about 20 votes, I will post the results on another blog entry. 

On Language

What is language? Language is the locally agreed upon set of complex sounds that represent objects, or symbols, and ideas in the form of words.* Words, then, are the representations of those agreed upon sounds in the local dialect(s) that reflect those particular objects, or symbols, and ideas. They are the representations of all of our communication, both verbal and written. These words are made of even smaller and simpler sounds. In most languages, those sounds are made up by letters. Each population has its own set of sounds to represent all of the things that they need to convey to one another in order to have a functioning society.

For example, in English we recognize the word “apple” and can concretely and definitively say what that “apple” is and what makes up the entirety of its apple-ness.** However, can you recognize “яблоко”? What about, “ تفاحة ”? Can you define “яблоко” in all of its яблоко-ness? Possibly you can, but perhaps not. Language is local, and sometimes extremely so. A person standing in Seoul will probably not recognize any of those words and may not even recognize them as words at all. Words only have as much meaning as you, as an individual, ascribe to them and it will certainly change from person to person.

However much meaning we, as individuals, like to try to put into what we say or what is said to us, and as many subtleties we may try to use, or inferences we try to make, in our daily communication, the fact remains that what you have to say is, and will always be, more concrete and more meaningful to yourself than anyone else. The more complex an idea expressed, the more different variations of meanings your listener can interpret and the higher probability of misinterpretation, even when two people are communicating in the same language/ dialect. Or, to paraphrase an idea of Umberto Eco’s, since there is no interpretive authority on which language is based, the interpretation is based on a combination of initiative on the part of the listener and contextual pressures, meaning deciding which meaning the communicator had in mind from a very finite number of interpretations based on the specific context of the communication.***

This is the reason that ‘parents just don’t understand’ and ‘men are from Mars and women are from Venus.’+ Except it is not just along generational or gender lines. Even people who have known each other their entire lives are incapable of correctly interpreting everything their counterpart says. So before the next time you get mad at your friend, your significant other, or are offended by some off-hand remark, just remember that whatever it was that got you all riled up could very well be a misunderstanding or misinterpretation. Remember that your interpretation is not the only interpretation and that you can be, and probably are, wrong.


Endnotes
*I am choosing to use the words object and symbol interchangeably here.
**Yes, I make up words.
*** Eco, Umberto, The Limits of Interpretation, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 20-21.
+ Granted, there are certain physiological differences in the latter case that make for simpler and often more comical misunderstandings.