Tired, and my head is full

I don't know what's wrong with me today. I cannot seem to get going. I feel like I have lead running through my veins. My limbs are heavy and my concentration is off. :( I can't wait for the winter to be over.

Last night I went with some friends to a talk at the Tenement Museum called Who Will Write our History? with a researcher named Samuel Kassow. It was wonderful. He talked about an act of jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto where a team of people catalogued statements and essays about the lives of the people there. Then years later the documents (about half of them) were excavated. It made me think anew about the notion of resistance, and about the confluence of history, qualitative research and archeology. What stories are hidden in the dirt, covered by time. That people gathered words and documents as time capsules of hope in the middle of hell, and stuck to historical and sociological methods in the process is just amazing to me.

The author answered questions at the end and my friend D asked how come so few people seem to know about this man Emanuel Ringelblum and his clandestine scholarly organization called the Oyneg Shabes. He said history frequently gets left out of teachings, and stories of everyday life often go uninterested until it's lost and a new generation grow curious about what life was like for a people in a particular place and time.

I am going to try and hold onto that answer as I work towards my dissertation. In social work we sometimes make commodities of people's stories. In my job, a psychosocial assessment becomes part of a package in the service of getting somebody housed. A cog in a wheel. A life distilled into "where were you, how did you get here, and what services do you need?" Then once the person is housed, the papers are filed and destroyed after 5 years, no longer useful for the purpose it was created. Will anyone know or care, in 60 years, about the small disjointed community of poor New Yorkers who passed through our doors? Maybe it's not as profound as the systematic mass murder of millions of people. But I hope my own research will act as a kind of resistance to the commodification of people, and be a conduit for social change in everyday people's lives.

John Oliver and Demitri Martin at the Apple Store SoHo

Hey, everyone.

I went to the SoHo Apple store tonight to see Demitri Martin talk about his new show, and he came with John Oliver as the "host" or "interviewer" or whatever. It was fun and will be up on iTunes soon I'm sure. John joked that it was the closest to "Frost/Nixon" he'd ever come.

Anyway, it was a fun little evening and you should download it to hear yourself. One part I liked was when people started asking questions and John "interpreted/translated" the questions for Demitri to answer. They showed a couple of clips from Demitri's show which were just ok. But one of them was a clip John was in and it was funny to see him in a costume (I won't say who so as not to spoil it). Apparently he's short-sighted and can't see anything without his glasses unless it's very very close. So he admitted he couldn't see a thing when he shot the scene.

I sat right up front but my mobile phone camera is notoriously awful.






Afterward my friend D and I were looking at iPhones when I saw them leaving. So I ran up to John on the stairs exiting the store. He was polite and friendly as usual. I thanked him for the use of a joke of his that I used during teaching and explained that I teach a policy history course to social work students. He smiled and said he was quite proud to know his jokes were being used in the service of social workers' education! Genuinely pleased. Heeee. (Of course I told him I gave him and The Bugle credit for the joke). Thankfully he didn't ask for any royalties. :o)

So, keep an eye out on iTunes for the Demitri Martin interview and you'll catch a delightful off-the cuff event with John Oliver.

Cheerio!

x-posted to brave_handsome