this post brought to you by many thousands of dollars and two useless degrees
i wrote to my mum the other day that in person i can barely open my mouth most of the time but give me a textual medium and you can't shut me up. well. case in point. this came up on my dash:
My literature classes didn’t help. My professors stressed the importance of approaching a text with detachment, with a critical gaze rather than an emotional one. There wasn’t a place in academia for gushing or ranting. There wasn’t room to simply say, “I loved this and I don’t know why.” One had to use academic jargon. One had to be methodical and thorough. It was like listening to a song and wanting so badly to get up and dance, but instead of dancing, you have to sit there and think about why those sounds made you want to dance and consider the exact mechanics behind the formula of a danceable song. And I didn’t want to fucking do that. I just wanted to dance. I just wanted to read. I just wanted to write. I didn’t want to deconstruct lines of poetry or do a close reading of Faulkner’s usage of semicolons.
Jenny Zhang, ‘The Quiet Importance of Angst-y Art’, Rookie
so of course i spent an hour expressing my emotions about language and it maybe was sort of articulate, so i decided i wanted to keep it here for posterity.
for reference.
this makes me really sad. and i can only say that it doesn’t have to be like that. that kind of rigidity is the fault of the professors or teachers and not the discipline itself. there is absolutely a place in the study of literature for gushing and ranting. it is necessary. hell, that’s what most of academic literature is: someone yelling about the text because they love it or they hate it. they just clothe it in a certain vocabulary.
i know people often complain about the “jargon” of academia but show me a space made by humans that doesn’t have its own terminology, its own method of communication. tumblr has jargon. slang is jargon. photography, medicine, gaming: all filled with jargon. but there’s this negative connotation to the idea of jargon that it really doesn’t deserve. any school you go to, any job you have, will in some way be opaque until you are familiar with its language and methods. and the more specific and esoteric you get, the more unfamiliar it will be because of its very nature.
while there are people who do use jargon to barricade a space or try to demonstrate some kind of superiority, that’s not the fault of the words. the words have been created to express some concept that requires expression. saying it’s meaningless or unnecessary is untrue; if it were either of those things it wouldn’t exist.
i guess it’s just that i don’t find that knowing the reason why the sun rises and sets makes watching the sun rise or set any less beautiful. it makes them more beautiful because i know how and why it happens and that just adds to the wonder of these amazing daily occurrences. examining the intricacies of a text, getting my hands all up in the guts of it, looking at it from multiple perspectives, breaking it into pieces to see how it works and then putting it back together: none of these things take away from the whole. they enhance and enrich it.
one of the original meanings of the word ‘jargon’ was ‘gibberish’: unintelligible or meaningless speech or writing. it was usually used in the context of colonialist forces talking about the native occupants of the land they were invading. their speech was dismissed as unintelligible and therefore meaningless because the invaders didn’t understand it. i say that merely to illustrate where the idea itself comes from. we see jargon as bad because we don’t understand it. but you can’t blame the words for your own lack of knowledge. anyone who has ever learned a new language knows how impenetrable it seems at first. yet we don’t blame the speakers of a language for that. (well maybe some people do idk.)
there’s nothing wrong with just wanting to dance. but there are actually people who do “sit there and think about why those sounds made you want to dance and consider the exact mechanics behind the formula of a danceable song”. most popular music is actually written by people who do just that. i heard a talk given by mike chapman who wrote or co-wrote some incredibly popular songs from the 70s through the 90s (the best by tina turner and love is a battlefield by pat benatar are probably two of the most well known). he said that when he made the move from the UK (where he’d had a string of hit singles) to the US his songs at first weren’t working for the audiences. he had to sit down and study what was popular, what american audiences liked. once he’d done that work, he was able to write songs that became hit singles in the US.
of course not everyone wants to write top 40 music. and not everyone who’s successful works to a formula. but it’s the same with writing. what works in a text, why it works, how you can recreate it in a new way or push back against it: these are things worth knowing. you can write without them. you can be successful without them. but i feel like you’re letting yourself down if you dismiss that knowledge because some words (jargon) got in your way. i mean, words are the point, right?
tags: #words are my life #me and my charms #holy shit this got out of hand #i just have a lot of feelings #language is magic #words are beautiful #you don't understand how passionate i am about language #do you understand how amazing it is that we have this symbolic means of communication #that we created ourselves #and there is so much variety all over the world #languages evolve and die and they have a life of their own that their creators never intended #and it's just fucking amazing #please don't let gatekeepers hold you back #language is like the tide #no one can hold it #but you can harness it #it's powerful #you can drift on it or dive into and it might very well kill you #never underestimate its danger #never fail to appreciate its glory #think about it: #i'm using language to talk about language #it is doing the thing that is the thing itself #WHAT ELSE IS LIKE THAT? #as;dlgjasldbgsa;dgj
okay maybe 'articulate' wasn't precisely the word for it.
--
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. If you feel inclined, comment there.
My literature classes didn’t help. My professors stressed the importance of approaching a text with detachment, with a critical gaze rather than an emotional one. There wasn’t a place in academia for gushing or ranting. There wasn’t room to simply say, “I loved this and I don’t know why.” One had to use academic jargon. One had to be methodical and thorough. It was like listening to a song and wanting so badly to get up and dance, but instead of dancing, you have to sit there and think about why those sounds made you want to dance and consider the exact mechanics behind the formula of a danceable song. And I didn’t want to fucking do that. I just wanted to dance. I just wanted to read. I just wanted to write. I didn’t want to deconstruct lines of poetry or do a close reading of Faulkner’s usage of semicolons.
Jenny Zhang, ‘The Quiet Importance of Angst-y Art’, Rookie
so of course i spent an hour expressing my emotions about language and it maybe was sort of articulate, so i decided i wanted to keep it here for posterity.
for reference.
this makes me really sad. and i can only say that it doesn’t have to be like that. that kind of rigidity is the fault of the professors or teachers and not the discipline itself. there is absolutely a place in the study of literature for gushing and ranting. it is necessary. hell, that’s what most of academic literature is: someone yelling about the text because they love it or they hate it. they just clothe it in a certain vocabulary.
i know people often complain about the “jargon” of academia but show me a space made by humans that doesn’t have its own terminology, its own method of communication. tumblr has jargon. slang is jargon. photography, medicine, gaming: all filled with jargon. but there’s this negative connotation to the idea of jargon that it really doesn’t deserve. any school you go to, any job you have, will in some way be opaque until you are familiar with its language and methods. and the more specific and esoteric you get, the more unfamiliar it will be because of its very nature.
while there are people who do use jargon to barricade a space or try to demonstrate some kind of superiority, that’s not the fault of the words. the words have been created to express some concept that requires expression. saying it’s meaningless or unnecessary is untrue; if it were either of those things it wouldn’t exist.
i guess it’s just that i don’t find that knowing the reason why the sun rises and sets makes watching the sun rise or set any less beautiful. it makes them more beautiful because i know how and why it happens and that just adds to the wonder of these amazing daily occurrences. examining the intricacies of a text, getting my hands all up in the guts of it, looking at it from multiple perspectives, breaking it into pieces to see how it works and then putting it back together: none of these things take away from the whole. they enhance and enrich it.
one of the original meanings of the word ‘jargon’ was ‘gibberish’: unintelligible or meaningless speech or writing. it was usually used in the context of colonialist forces talking about the native occupants of the land they were invading. their speech was dismissed as unintelligible and therefore meaningless because the invaders didn’t understand it. i say that merely to illustrate where the idea itself comes from. we see jargon as bad because we don’t understand it. but you can’t blame the words for your own lack of knowledge. anyone who has ever learned a new language knows how impenetrable it seems at first. yet we don’t blame the speakers of a language for that. (well maybe some people do idk.)
there’s nothing wrong with just wanting to dance. but there are actually people who do “sit there and think about why those sounds made you want to dance and consider the exact mechanics behind the formula of a danceable song”. most popular music is actually written by people who do just that. i heard a talk given by mike chapman who wrote or co-wrote some incredibly popular songs from the 70s through the 90s (the best by tina turner and love is a battlefield by pat benatar are probably two of the most well known). he said that when he made the move from the UK (where he’d had a string of hit singles) to the US his songs at first weren’t working for the audiences. he had to sit down and study what was popular, what american audiences liked. once he’d done that work, he was able to write songs that became hit singles in the US.
of course not everyone wants to write top 40 music. and not everyone who’s successful works to a formula. but it’s the same with writing. what works in a text, why it works, how you can recreate it in a new way or push back against it: these are things worth knowing. you can write without them. you can be successful without them. but i feel like you’re letting yourself down if you dismiss that knowledge because some words (jargon) got in your way. i mean, words are the point, right?
tags: #words are my life #me and my charms #holy shit this got out of hand #i just have a lot of feelings #language is magic #words are beautiful #you don't understand how passionate i am about language #do you understand how amazing it is that we have this symbolic means of communication #that we created ourselves #and there is so much variety all over the world #languages evolve and die and they have a life of their own that their creators never intended #and it's just fucking amazing #please don't let gatekeepers hold you back #language is like the tide #no one can hold it #but you can harness it #it's powerful #you can drift on it or dive into and it might very well kill you #never underestimate its danger #never fail to appreciate its glory #think about it: #i'm using language to talk about language #it is doing the thing that is the thing itself #WHAT ELSE IS LIKE THAT? #as;dlgjasldbgsa;dgj
okay maybe 'articulate' wasn't precisely the word for it.
--
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. If you feel inclined, comment there.