Do you ever find yourself randomly stumbling on a subject and becoming completely engrossed by it to the point where you spend hour after hour obsessively tracking down every little piece of info you can? I know I'm not alone because at least LadyShea is a total research machine, but I've lost whole weekends barely realizing any time had passed focused on some random subject.
It's usually history and art that hooks me. Today it was a sculptor I'd never heard of before even though his pieces now sell for millions of dollars at auction and his brother was iconic Italian car manufacturer Ettore Bugatti. I've been collecting notes about him all day which will eventually be a looong blog post.
Other times it's a historical period or a poem or a plant. The internet makes this kind of time vortex so easy to fall into. If someone would just pay me to look up random shit that strikes my fancy, I would dedicate my life to it, I swear.
Oh yah. Wikipedia don't help, either. I have regular bouts of serial killer research, but I can usually keep that online and limit it to one or two days. A few weeks ago I started out reading the Beast of Gévaudan article and this led to a whole thing on wolf attacks on humans and cryptozoology.
But I have more worrisome research obsessions as well. Pointless, consuming fixations on obscure and wholly unimportant topics that have no value to anyone else. These things monopolize my mind and my time, and because of them, even without realistic hope of tangible reward, I spend countless hours in the library.
I lost a Saturday a few weeks ago on Tatars, then Russian Tatars, Ukranian Tatars and Polish Tatars, then Polish Muslims etc.
Oh! I have a book for that! It's called The Volga Tatars: A Profile in National Resilience by Azade-Ayse Rorlich. It is part of a Hoover Institution series of studies on nationalities in the USSR (it's out of date) and is the first Western-language history of the Volga Tatars. Like I said, it's old - from 1986 - but it doesn't look like there has been a ton of new scholarship in the area. That is kind of surprising given the resurgence of Tatar identity in late- and post-Soviet Russia, centered in and around Kazan, Tatarstan.
I haven't read it because I'm not super interested in the Tatars. I just bought it because it was cheap and you never know. The Hoover Institution series itself is really, really great.
Huh, yeah that is kinda old. I might look into it anyway, because I am kinda interested. I can't really remember how I got into it, but I was weirded out that there were these Muslims who have been part of European history for centuries and hardly anybody even knows this.
Oh yah. Wikipedia don't help, either. I have regular bouts of serial killer research, but I can usually keep that online and limit it to one or two days. A few weeks ago I started out reading the Beast of Gévaudan article and this led to a whole thing on wolf attacks on humans and cryptozoology.
Welp, looks like I've found what I'll be doing next weekend. Wikipedia and its links and footnotes and additional resources is a most vicious enabler of my research addiction. If you ever make it through law school between bouts of random research huffing, we should get a class action going.
No seriously the Beast of Gévaudan shit is dangerous just for the sociological dimension. DON'T CLICK ON THIS IF YOU WANT YOUR LIFE:
That eventually led me to The Great Fear, which annoyingly connected with my casual interest in the French Revolution. For a while now I have been collecting books by Georges Lefebvre, who is, for my money, the historian of the Revolution. Anyway, they have just been sitting on my shelf for a long time, but I had this one called "The Great Fear of 1789," and I finally had to read it and IT WAS AWESOME.
You know, if I could muster, say, 25% of the enthusiasm I have for that kind of thing, and use it for any single law school class, I would be in such good shape.
OMG French Revolution. That's a recurring sinkhole of mine. This one lady who has a blog dedicated solely to the Affair of the Diamond Necklace emailed me once to exchange links and that set me off on this Marie Antoinette, Cardinal Rohan, Jeanne de la Motte, memoirs, pamphlets, trial transcripts madness that went on for a week.
A sinkhole! That's exactly what it is! Because every time I feel like I start to have a grasp on its conceptual edges, I sink further into it and I lose my grip on the metaphor entirely. I know that happens with virtually all history, but usually at some point I feel like "OK, I have a pretty firm grasp on this." Not so with the Revolution. I just feel more and more like I have no fucking clue wtf happened.
For a long time in grad school I was seriously considering entering a PhD program in Poli Sci or History, and the question that I thought I wanted to study was this: How do states behave in extremis? Basically, when confronted with coup d'état or revolution, what does a regime do? How do individual actors within the regime decide what to do? At what point do they decide to abandon the old regime and guarantee the victory of the new? Most of my interest in this was based on a sub-obsession of mine, the August Coup of 1991, and a few other examples within my East European comfort zone, like the Romanian Revolution. But to get out of my zone, I decided to go back to the grand-daddy of European Revolution and dig into the French Revolution. I had had some exposure to it as a French major in undergrad, like what a French kid might learn in middle school I imagine, and I thought I knew some shit. Damn, I was so wrong yo. Three days of pussy-ass old communists trying to lock Gorbachev in his bedroom ain't shit.
Oh I'm definitely way more ignorant on the Revolution than I was in high school. Even the basic timeline has grown from a busy but linear one into a crazed interwoven tangle of threads I couldn't possibly keep straight in my head. And I'll tell you what: I love it like that. I wouldn't want it any other way. It's a gushing fount of obsession that never ever ends.
Definitely true crime. I enjoyed reading Anne Rule's books from way back when, but one time about seven or eight years ago I discovered the crimelibrary website (might be called something else now?) while at a job that required me to be there all day but only do four hours or so of work, and that was it. Is it just me or do most true crime afficianados have "favorites"? I've met many people over the years that found it weird that a generally peaceful and anti-violent person was so interested in these things For me it's always been about the psychological aspect of it - if I had been better educated and more motivated/focused earlier in life, forensic pyschiatry would probably have been on my list of career interests.
When I was de-converting from fundamentalist Christianity I had a "cult research" phase.
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"I'm as self-contained as a turtle. When I put my key in the
ignition, I have my home right behind me."
Once I spent like a whole day reading about adult babies. It was like 1995 or so, I think, so there wasn't like a huge selection of stuff to read about as much, so that. That is why I spent like a whole day reading about adult babies. Because THERE WAS NOTHING ELSE ON THE INTERNET.
Anyways, that paid off pretty sweet, because that next Monday or so, a guy I knew at work came back from vacation in New Orleans, and I was all like, "Hey, so how was your vacation? Did you have fun? Did you see any ADULT BABIES?" Because I was going to try to top his dumb vacation with my story of seeing some websites of adult babies.
But he looked at me kind of quiet like for a while, then he said, "Yes. I met an adult baby. I didn't know there were other ones."
You know, if I could muster, say, 25% of the enthusiasm I have for that kind of thing, and use it for any single law school class, I would be in such good shape.
This is why I am so unbelievably lucky. Pretty much every research obsession I develop (many of which involve chasing down attributed quotes, or trying to source details from throwaway subordinate clauses in reportive writing) feeds into my teaching and writing. I can make this stuff my job! Am I the luckiest skunk in the world?
You know, if I could muster, say, 25% of the enthusiasm I have for that kind of thing, and use it for any single law school class, I would be in such good shape.
This is why I am so unbelievably lucky. Pretty much every research obsession I develop (many of which involve chasing down attributed quotes, or trying to source details from throwaway subordinate clauses in reportive writing) feeds into my teaching and writing. I can make this stuff my job! Am I the luckiest skunk in the world?
Well, I spent about a half-hour today looking up information on yeast bud scar formations. Not a lot out there. Did learn there are at least two general types, axial and polar, and that there is ongoing research into what specifically causes the types. Mostly my obsessions are centered around biology or psychology. But not crime.
One thing that bugged me about the Crime Library site was that some of the articles really played up aspects of the perpetrator's lives that I didn't feel were relevant, such as the 'lesbian teens who kill their guardians' one without any recognition of the fact that heterosexuals have committed essentially identical crimes. In the case of straight teen lovers who kill, their sexuality was referenced only in the genders of the people involved, rather than repeated descriptions of them as 'hetero murderers' or whatever.
In fairness, that may be due to a desire for luridness as much as any social conservative bigotry.
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Much of MADNESS, and more of SIN, and HORROR the soul of the plot.
I was just reading about Paul Bernardo at the Crime Library site and there was a lot of that lurid, judgmental writing in the article. Not just about his wife's "lasciviousness" proven by tapes of her having sex with women, but some disturbing shit like women he met "spreading their legs" for him.