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—Nick Alvarado, Tim Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls
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—Nick Alvarado, Tim Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls
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Apr. 21st, 2018
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“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; If we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved–as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds–because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simply because it is there–important, that is, simply as an idea.”
- Wallace Stegner.
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“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; If we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved–as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds–because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simply because it is there–important, that is, simply as an idea.”
- Wallace Stegner.
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pearwaldorf:
platovevo:
platovevo:
it’s really fucking interesting that accusations of inaccessibility never seem to be levied against The Hard Sciences
if someone asks me what i’m doing in lab and i explain a little bit of maxwell’s vortex hypothesis, nobody expects to understand the whole thing. you have to have some foundational knowledge of calculus and electromagnetism, and you need to study faraday’s experimental data; without those, i can give you a summary of maxwell but i can’t possibly make you understand the whole thing. that’s not a failing on my part, your part, or maxwell’s. it’s just how it goes when someone produces a paper in a specialized field, and people generally accept that.
if someone asks me what i’m writing my annual essay on and i say it’s about spinoza’s conception of god as explicated through nature, suddenly i’ll get people who expect that either the entire thing needs to be stated in fifth-grade vocab terms, in which case they’ll shit on the entire field of philosophy for being easy, or i’m being inaccessible and elitist, in which case they’ll shit on the entire field of philosophy for being pretentious and esoteric. it’s striking, actually, the extent to which people have different expectations of subjects i’m in fact studying simultaneously in an interdisciplinary program.
there are plenty of academics who overuse jargon, whose writing is genuinely unintelligible and needlessly convoluted, and who i would like to punch in the face. but the solution to that problem is not to make blanket statements about how knowledge must always be accessible to people outside the field. and even when people do make those statements they never mean them. what they mean is that they think humanities are essentially lower and dumber than hard sciences and that the way students discuss them should reflect that.
This is the thing that irks me, because whether in science or humanities, scholars aren’t writing for laypeople. They’re writing for people with at least some knowledge of the discipline, and are exploring problems/issues within it. Jargon is a way of rolling up complicated concepts in more compact linguistic terms, and isn’t meant to be accessible to outsiders. If I use “disintermediation” in a community of librarians and information professionals, that’s a much easier way of saying “the concept of removing librarians and other reference personnel from a user’s process of information seeking”.
Can jargon be used as a gatekeeping mechanism? Absolutely. But insisting that everything is explainable in fifth grade vocab terms isn’t a solution to that.
Which is not to say that you shouldn’t be able to explain complicated concepts in sciences or the humanities to a reasonably intelligent layperson, but there’s just so much background information you’re going to need to fill in for them to even begin to understand. It’s not a question of them being able to grasp it or not, but the gaps between levels at which a layperson and an expert operate at.
You wouldn’t expect a newborn baby to talk in complete sentences or walk on their own, because they haven’t developed enough to do that. I would not expect a layperson, however intelligent, to be able to talk about advantages and drawbacks of new advances in nanotechnology or differences in views of post-structuralist philosophers without a lot of remedial explanation. And that’s fine! There’s nothing shameful about it!
It’s always curious to me that America (maybe other places, but this is the one I know best) has simultaneously this insistence that you can learn anything if you just try hard enough but also this incredible disdain for intellectual pursuit if it doesn’t lead to fat cash moneys. This sort of tension manifests in all sorts of interesting ways.
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pearwaldorf:
platovevo:
platovevo:
it’s really fucking interesting that accusations of inaccessibility never seem to be levied against The Hard Sciences
if someone asks me what i’m doing in lab and i explain a little bit of maxwell’s vortex hypothesis, nobody expects to understand the whole thing. you have to have some foundational knowledge of calculus and electromagnetism, and you need to study faraday’s experimental data; without those, i can give you a summary of maxwell but i can’t possibly make you understand the whole thing. that’s not a failing on my part, your part, or maxwell’s. it’s just how it goes when someone produces a paper in a specialized field, and people generally accept that.
if someone asks me what i’m writing my annual essay on and i say it’s about spinoza’s conception of god as explicated through nature, suddenly i’ll get people who expect that either the entire thing needs to be stated in fifth-grade vocab terms, in which case they’ll shit on the entire field of philosophy for being easy, or i’m being inaccessible and elitist, in which case they’ll shit on the entire field of philosophy for being pretentious and esoteric. it’s striking, actually, the extent to which people have different expectations of subjects i’m in fact studying simultaneously in an interdisciplinary program.
there are plenty of academics who overuse jargon, whose writing is genuinely unintelligible and needlessly convoluted, and who i would like to punch in the face. but the solution to that problem is not to make blanket statements about how knowledge must always be accessible to people outside the field. and even when people do make those statements they never mean them. what they mean is that they think humanities are essentially lower and dumber than hard sciences and that the way students discuss them should reflect that.
This is the thing that irks me, because whether in science or humanities, scholars aren’t writing for laypeople. They’re writing for people with at least some knowledge of the discipline, and are exploring problems/issues within it. Jargon is a way of rolling up complicated concepts in more compact linguistic terms, and isn’t meant to be accessible to outsiders. If I use “disintermediation” in a community of librarians and information professionals, that’s a much easier way of saying “the concept of removing librarians and other reference personnel from a user’s process of information seeking”.
Can jargon be used as a gatekeeping mechanism? Absolutely. But insisting that everything is explainable in fifth grade vocab terms isn’t a solution to that.
Which is not to say that you shouldn’t be able to explain complicated concepts in sciences or the humanities to a reasonably intelligent layperson, but there’s just so much background information you’re going to need to fill in for them to even begin to understand. It’s not a question of them being able to grasp it or not, but the gaps between levels at which a layperson and an expert operate at.
You wouldn’t expect a newborn baby to talk in complete sentences or walk on their own, because they haven’t developed enough to do that. I would not expect a layperson, however intelligent, to be able to talk about advantages and drawbacks of new advances in nanotechnology or differences in views of post-structuralist philosophers without a lot of remedial explanation. And that’s fine! There’s nothing shameful about it!
It’s always curious to me that America (maybe other places, but this is the one I know best) has simultaneously this insistence that you can learn anything if you just try hard enough but also this incredible disdain for intellectual pursuit if it doesn’t lead to fat cash moneys. This sort of tension manifests in all sorts of interesting ways.
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lesbiandaydream:
concealingeyez:
lesbiandaydream:
lesbiandaydream:
the moment i learned that avril lavigne is straight was a top 10 anime betrayal i mean have you seen 2002 avril
i want to live in the timeline where avril is a long-haired sporty butch brat
The original Lavigne was a lesbian her clone’s straight
yknow what you’re right
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lesbiandaydream:
concealingeyez:
lesbiandaydream:
lesbiandaydream:
the moment i learned that avril lavigne is straight was a top 10 anime betrayal i mean have you seen 2002 avril
i want to live in the timeline where avril is a long-haired sporty butch brat
The original Lavigne was a lesbian her clone’s straight
yknow what you’re right
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violentwavesofemotion:
Emily Dickinson, from a letter c. 1880 featured in The Selected Letters of Emily Dickinson (x)
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violentwavesofemotion:
Emily Dickinson, from a letter c. 1880 featured in The Selected Letters of Emily Dickinson (x)
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impalaofgrace:
I’m hearing a few whispers.
I Know What You Did Last Summer +
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impalaofgrace:
I’m hearing a few whispers.
I Know What You Did Last Summer +
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catonhottinroof:
Proskurnin Ivan Mikhaylovich (1852-1901)
A clear morning. Birch grove.
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catonhottinroof:
Proskurnin Ivan Mikhaylovich (1852-1901)
A clear morning. Birch grove.
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soyonscruels:
Ivy’s favorite comic book characters ☇ Loki Laufeyson
To achieve this, my very self is mortgaged to wicked creatures time and time over. I have freed one of Asgard’s greatest enemies and facilitated the death of our greatest protector. My people will still loathe me, and the grave holds the one who protected me. I do not know ‘what now.’ I think if I thought of it, I would weep for me. But that would be awfully self-centered wouldn’t it? Let’s save worrying about tomorrow for our newly purchased dawn.
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soyonscruels:
Ivy’s favorite comic book characters ☇ Loki Laufeyson
To achieve this, my very self is mortgaged to wicked creatures time and time over. I have freed one of Asgard’s greatest enemies and facilitated the death of our greatest protector. My people will still loathe me, and the grave holds the one who protected me. I do not know ‘what now.’ I think if I thought of it, I would weep for me. But that would be awfully self-centered wouldn’t it? Let’s save worrying about tomorrow for our newly purchased dawn.
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inso-uciant:
richassness:
90s babies we’re getting old
i don’t want to talk about it
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inso-uciant:
richassness:
90s babies we’re getting old
i don’t want to talk about it
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rachelberrys:
If you’re gonna go lezzy with a cheerleader,
I think the world’s kind of rooting for you and Quinn Fabray.
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rachelberrys:
If you’re gonna go lezzy with a cheerleader,
I think the world’s kind of rooting for you and Quinn Fabray.
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