strolling through an essay

I found it quite funny that when I tried to cut and paste several passages from Philip J. Ethington's website onto a word document for my notes, I kept getting a blank page. It took me a few seconds to realize that the font was white. It felt like he wasn't letting me pin down his words with my old fashioned note-taking.

"Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge" is an amazing project--in its broad scope and its approach to knowledge. Like the white font, it is also purposefully difficult to grasp at first. He means it to be approached as a "totality," read like a newspaper. While I admit that I was a bit annoyed with this at first, the approach grew on me. Unlike most articles I read, I thought about his website a lot afterwards. Initially, I kept thinking, "just get to the point." What is his point about literally mapping the past? I'm still not sure. Wondering what the point is... is his point, in a way.

Now, this is something that I spend most of my time doing with my own research, this searching for the point. Going off on tangents, making links between vastly different sources, wandering through a historiography and sometimes getting lost. I have come to believe that "the point" should assume these things but should be presented in final form free of them. In other words, it should be well stitched. We all know that it was formed out of disparate pieces of knowledge, but the art of it is creating something intelligible out of the mess.

But it's the mess that I always go back to, at least in my head, to wonder what other sort of thing I could have stitched with the same pieces. Ethington creates something of a controlled mess in which to wander, and in doing so challenges my urge to "clean up." It's not just a simple mess: it's quite well organized but it demands effort to engage with it. Like a good book, I know I'll go back to it, if only to try to figure it out again. And each time I'll probably learn something new.