Academic Swag.

“The life of an academic is a solitary one.”  I’m okay with that. In fact, I quite like it. 

I’ve been “researching” for the past few days now.  I put researching in quotes because up until this point, I’ve had no idea what that meant, at least for people in the humanities.  At least if you’re in the sciences, you have the aesthetic experience of being in a lab, experimenting, collecting data…all that good shit.  But if you’re studying Latin American and Iberian cultures, like I am, how does one do “research”? 

Well quite simply, research is as it sounds.  It’s a search, or at least that’s what I’ve been discovering.  Everyday when I go into the library, I open whatever book I’ve managed to find from the previous day and I read.  I learn about new things.  New places.  New people.  New ideas.  And all these things lead me to another book, and the process starts again.  It all happens very organically, which I’m digging.  A lot. 

For example: I started reading about Latin American literature.  What its concerns were, commons themes, some of the key players, etc.  From there, I found a series of lectures by Mario Vargas Llosa, a pretty bitchin’ Peruvian writer who won the Nobel Prize in 2010.  I read a lecture in which he talked about one of his favorite books, La Guerra del Fin del Mundo. For all you non-Spanish speakers out there, that means, “The War of the End of the World.”  It’s a highly fictionalized novel, but it uses real historical events, specifically the Brazilian “Canudos Campaign” of 1896-1897, as its raw material.  Why is this interesting?  Well, there’s a whole backdrop of conflicting political, religious, and ideological interests that makes this particular event in Brazilian history fascinating.  It grapples with ideas such as westernization, modernization, (mis) communication, etc.  I’m trying to write a paper about this, specifically how the manipulation of language functions as a political player, for an undergraduate journal…so hopefully I’ll be published in a few months.  But here’s hoping.  

That’s all for now.  Back to the library…actually, I’m done for the day.  Just gonna troll, but until tomorrow!