learning journal 6: watching the english and other things

First, I wanted to share a word from Katie Fox that delighted me: pontificate. I also heard it in Scott Russell Sanders' interview, that I mentioned a few posts back, and it must have been fate because I read Fox within the next day or so.

Pontificate means this: to express one's opinions in a way considered annoyingly pompous and dogmatic.

Okay, so with that said, let me turn to Katie Fox. She seems to be surprisingly and delightfully frank in her writing, a trait that most people lack and I have come to appreciate when I find it. I would have loved to read her introduction along with Babbie's readings from last Friday. This is what she said, that I wanted Babbie to say the whole time I was reading him/her: "while participant observation has its limitations, this rather uneasy combination of involvement and detachment is still the best method we have for exploring the complexities of human cultures, so it will have to do" (4). Fox says outright that there is no perfect way to perform a field study, but proceeds to do the best she can. It's interesting, because she explained the process that most people have to go through when planning a field study. You have to confront the limitations of the study you are about to embark on; otherwise, if you attempt to find the "perfect" way, you will invariably fail. I guess there's another otherwise here: if you ignore the limitations inherent in field studies, you are in danger of believing your opinion to be the end all, be all of field studies. Arrogance will lead you down forbidden paths, paths full of pontification and blather.

We don't want that, do we?

Anyway, how does this relate to my project? My project, admittedly, won't be focused on studying contemporary British culture, although it will certainly be a part of it. Because I am focusing my studies on dead essayists, I will have a unique challenge of studying the past while still trying to observe and understand the present. And this will, naturally, mean that I have to decide what approach I will have when confronted with the living. It's something that I won't be able to get away from, something that I will have to decide. I will say up front that I don't plan on conducting formal interviews--my plans (as of right now) are to observe and, as Alexander Smith said, to keep my eye open to the "infinite suggestiveness of common things" so that I will be attune to people around me and talk to them when I am thus inspired to do so. And inspired by what? the spirit? the muse? who knows what.

All I know is that it is 2:30 am, and I am in the basement of my house doing homework as I have been doing for the past several hours, and I can hear my roommate snoring in the room above me, and I am going to bed.