stay hungry, stay foolish
Thomas Sugrue was born in Detroit and studied history at Colombia, Cambridge and Harvard, wrote books on civil rights and the urban crisis, and was an expert witness on a few Supreme Court cases before he wound up lecturing about the 1960s to me and 60-odd other students at Penn. Apparently we're not the only people to realise he's a gifted speaker because according to his Wiki he often talks at commencements and that kind of thing. That's why I wasn't surprised when he asked us to observe a moment's silence before class this morning in honour of the Virginia Tech massacre, which took place a year ago today.
It was one more example of this force at work in America that I keep trying to get my head around. They're very good at things like that, the Americans. They have this talent for formality, which is pretty funny when you think how much they mock us Brits for the stiff upper lip and all that, but they really do it better. You can see the same process at work when they're singing the national anthem at baseball games, or asking people in the military to stand up at Sea World, or making their kids pledge allegiance to the flag in school; it's this impulse to regulate common activity, ostensibly to derive some greater benefit from it. In all honestly I'm still a long way from understanding it, but for the moment at least it suffices for me to realise that this is something totally alien to my experiences growing up in the UK. Yeah, I've got to think about it more before I can work out what they're up to.
In other news I have to start writing again and I'm planing on doing it here. I've taken shit for granted for way too long. Sooner or later I had to wake up and realise life ain't gonna be handed to be on no plate, sister. Hugh McLeod said something ages ago that slipped into my memory somehow and I wish it would go round in my head all the time as ferociously as it's been doing today: 90% of the difference between the people who are successful and the people who aren't is hard work. If only this would catalyse me into jumping up and doing something productive with my time instead of sitting in this room listening to Marianne Faithful. I swear I'm stuck between one mind 3 years younger than my body and one that's 13 years older. This is going nowhere. Well, it's a good start. Nobody ever struck an honesty well after one day of digging.
Bah.
It was one more example of this force at work in America that I keep trying to get my head around. They're very good at things like that, the Americans. They have this talent for formality, which is pretty funny when you think how much they mock us Brits for the stiff upper lip and all that, but they really do it better. You can see the same process at work when they're singing the national anthem at baseball games, or asking people in the military to stand up at Sea World, or making their kids pledge allegiance to the flag in school; it's this impulse to regulate common activity, ostensibly to derive some greater benefit from it. In all honestly I'm still a long way from understanding it, but for the moment at least it suffices for me to realise that this is something totally alien to my experiences growing up in the UK. Yeah, I've got to think about it more before I can work out what they're up to.
In other news I have to start writing again and I'm planing on doing it here. I've taken shit for granted for way too long. Sooner or later I had to wake up and realise life ain't gonna be handed to be on no plate, sister. Hugh McLeod said something ages ago that slipped into my memory somehow and I wish it would go round in my head all the time as ferociously as it's been doing today: 90% of the difference between the people who are successful and the people who aren't is hard work. If only this would catalyse me into jumping up and doing something productive with my time instead of sitting in this room listening to Marianne Faithful. I swear I'm stuck between one mind 3 years younger than my body and one that's 13 years older. This is going nowhere. Well, it's a good start. Nobody ever struck an honesty well after one day of digging.
Bah.
posted by rich at 4:14 am
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