Ephemeralness

I’m currently up to my eye-balls in papers to write before the semester ends. Today is consisting of trying to get a solid start on my paper for Historical Methods, which is about the MPAA appeal staged by Warner Brothers for All the President’s Men.

This is perhaps my favorite quote, which I found a way to use in the paper because I love the comparison.

“Woodward and Bernstein play no role in the constitutional Watergate story, and All the President’s Men, when it is discussed, is presented as bearing to the real drama of Watergate something like the relationship of Rosenkrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead to Hamlet” – Micheal Schudson, Watergate in American Memory

It might only be really funny if you’ve ever read or watched Rosenkrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead, so that you can appreciate just how little they have to do with Hamlet. Hmm, it seems extensive paper writing makes me punchy.

And another quote, because I don’t think I can work this one into the paper and I love it just as much:

“The forms of collective memory, attached to human or humanly constructed vechicles, are an aspect of human culture through which time travels. What happens in daily social life is the reverse of H.G. Wells or Back to the Future: we do not travel in a machine to the past; the past travels (through a variety of cultural machines) to us.” – Micheal Schudson, WiAM.