There’s a tension, when I write these. I want them to be interesting – not just in content but in execution. I’m drawn to the rhetorical flourish, to the polished sentence, to an interesting sequence of sounds. Only these texts are public-facing, an interface between you and I, so I’m incredibly aware of how I’m coming across. I try to perform calmness. I try to play the role of someone who is confident, at ease, perfectly aware of what I am saying and how it is going to be said.
The problem: I’ve got too many goddamn thoughts and wrestling any of them into a coherent order feels like pulling teeth. I’m blaming the general gloom of January – I feel half-asleep, and the dreaming’s infected my thoughts. (Can you tell I watched Paprika for the first time recently?
Last time, I spoke about loosening up. About letting the thoughts take the shape that they need to take. With that in mind, I’m going to lean into the chaos. Writing fast and loose, let’s go.
I spent Christmas with my family, who are very into quiz shows. This meant I watched a lot of The Chase, Celebrity Mastermind, Tenable, Only Connect, University Challenge, etc etc etc. So I’ve been thinking about trivia, and about the kinds of knowledge that allow for it.
To make a quick-n-dirty semantic distinction: there’s knowledge of the humanities, and then there’s humanistic knowledge. Knowledge of the humanities is the kind of thing you get quiz questions on: e.g. Lavinia is the daughter of which titular Shakespeare character? Who painted the Mona Lisa? It’s an exercise in memorisation, in knowing the figures and facts. Humanistic knowledge, on the other hand, is analysis, contextualisation, discussion. It’s an understanding that is at once broad and deep. Humanistic knowledge grasps the interconnectedness of all things, and seeks to chase those connections as far as it can manage. Harder to measure. More self-aware.
Humanistic knowledge never shows up in quiz shows. Which makes sense, right? ‘Give a brief analysis of this poem’ doesn’t make for great TV – at least for the majority of people who aren’t me. Quiz shows thrive on solid, incontrovertible feedback. Did you get the answer right? How many points did you earn? It feels good to be able to spit knowledge out like that. It looks and sounds impressive.
I’m not averse to quiz shows – they’re fun! Facts and figures have their place – you need to know the basic details of what you’re talking about before you can properly talk about it. That said, knowledge is always messy. When you get to the highest levels of any field, even STEM, I imagine there’s a lot of nuance and room for debate – because you’ve gotten to the things that we don’t properly know, not yet. Humanistic knowledge understands that all knowledge is socially constructed, that it comes from people with messy impulses and unexamined bias.
A guy I knew at uni wrote on Brideshead Revisited in a first-year exam and managed to get a 2:1 even though he forgot the name of one of the main characters. I’m glad I work in a field where that can be the case.
Puny, Defenceless Bipeds (Ghost Light)
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