This may be my favorite reading so far; it has mapped not only onto my own life, but also onto teaching in German Studies. Plus, who doesn't love a good porcupine story...
My life: the 80s, the rise of video culture especially music videos as the encapsulating of bigger things/feelings/moments is where my interest and interaction in film, media, "cultural products".
My German Studies connection is the study of Alltag "the everyday" in life, a movement that came out of socialist realism and was both the savior and the bane of "culture" in the 1970s and 1980s in Germany. Everyone started talking about what was going on in the everyday, what was in the grocery story, who wrote what letters to the newspapers, when did work begin/end, what chapters were assigned to be read by school children. Some of these were frightfully boring accounts, obviously, until you had heard/read/watched 20 hours of it when all of a sudden you realized how hooked you were; but more than that, the idea that daily life was worthy of study and revealed things that we needed and wanted to know...creative juices flowed into VERY extended projects and detail-oriented interviews and journals and, and, and...it captured the popular "imagination" in a way that turns out to be much more valuable than just knowing the dates of the last great ruler of ancient Egypt. (This is absolutely anathema for Germans--we Americans might get it much faster). And, finally getting to my point, quoting Viola: "Discoveries are made which reveal that more and more things are related, connected (466)". And I add--harder to pass judgment on/dismiss (and therefore easier to learn from).
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