Summer, scholar's butt, and mon cher Serge

Warning: this is not going to be a particularly exciting post. It is exam season, so you're going to get a lot of paper and red ink and scholar's butt.

Okay, if that hasn't scared you off, then read on, brave souls.

First of all: Brussels weather has gone from absolutely dreadful, horrible, no-good, and awful to balmy and stunning and summery in the past weeks. I love watching this city flourisse as the sun comes out and bakes the ponds and the cobblestones and the terrasses; Bruxellois get out of their cozy apartments and their rain-resistant parkas and instead show off their (often blindingly white) appendages beside ponds and in city squares and on park benches. Bars and pubs empty out; terrasses become overcrowded with people drinking white beers with lemons, or fresh-squeezed orange juice, or cold sparkling wine. Music goes outside, too: we happened upon a klezmer jam session whose wailing clarinet echoed through Abbaye de la Cambre last week; I've passed by countless guitar-types strumming lazily by the Etangs d'Ixelles during my runs/study breaks; entire neighborhoods buzzed with straw-fedora-sporting, sundress-swirling jazz fans this weekend during the mostly outdoor Jazz Marathon (Brussels, for those who (like myself) didn't really know, is one of Europe's greatest jazz meccas; Adolf Sax invented the saxophone not far from here, and Django Reinhardt, one of the great jazz banjo players (apparently this is a thing?) got his start at l'Archiduc downtown).

It's fun to watch the lines for the ice cream stands lengthen; to see the Sunday markets double in size and attendance (and quality of produce); to finally get rid of the fleeces on my bed and instead fling all the windows open to welcome the warm Brussels breeze. It's actually pretty surreal to write the phrase "warm Brussels breeze", considering how frigid Brussels was being in February. Everyone changes, I guess, even this quirky, manic-depressive city.

It is, of course, one of the great ironies of life that ULB (and actually all the Brussels unifs) have exams during this heart-breakingly beautiful weather. I have to admit that these lovely glimpses of Bruxellois profiting from le beau temps have mostly come as I've worked in cafes and bars with a lait russe or a Hoegaarden for company. My classmates have all told me not to get used to the pretty weather, or to expect it to last until exams are over (I have been eagerly planning to take Leo and one lucky person to Ostende when exams are over; I was told not to count on Belgian weather behaving. Fingers crossed.) They all laugh that their spring semester grades are much worse than their fall ones, a phenomenon which I can attest is pretty universal (you Davidsonians remember how hard it is to lock yourself up in Chambers or the libes when the lawn beckons you to sunbathe and frolic, and probably also remember the effect that that temptation had on final grades :)

To be honest, though, I have enjoyed this re-defining of the idea of "public intellectual." I don't really fancy myself an intellectual these days- more like an Anglophone naufragée (a shipwrecked sailor) trying to keep her head above the waters of French-laced philosophy and economic theory and jurisprudence- but I am enjoying the ritual of shyly ordering my drink, staking out my table near a window, and reading and writing and thinking and sometimes watching the terrasse-dwellers and ever so often blogging out in public. I'm enjoying the laughing informal bonds I've formed with a few cafe workers; the brief conversations with fellow internet hopefuls stalking wifi desperately; the funny conversations with philosophers-errant marveling at the stocky Aristotle on my table, or maybe just the fact that I type "mais vraiment hyper vite, ma belle!"

I can't make a lot of direct links between the linguistics of judicial oaths and my conversation with a bored Italian about the best gelato flavor at Capoue; but I can say that something about the ritual of writing and thinking in cafes and bars that are fast becoming my haunts fits with my hopes of living as a student in Europe. No, the past few weeks haven't produced Erasmus-style photos of eight nationalities crowded around a camera, glowing with dancing sweat and Belgian draughts; no, they haven't added a ton of ticket stubs and printed programs to my scrapbook-wall; no, I haven't discovered a lot of deep insights into the Belgian mind, or the European outlook, or the Belgo-Congolese relationship. That said, I am learning, I think to begin seeing the neighborhood where I live as mon quartier; to accept my (sometimes maddening) editing job and its memorable boss as a pretty funny learning experience; to finally face up to my academic fears and write new thesis work, new lengthy French papers; to grin, and sometimes love, the work, or at least the fun places where I get to do work.

Final thought, before I return to typing notes: when I study for exams in French or write papers in French, I like to listen to French music. For some reason, half-hearing francophone lyrics makes it much easier to think, write, copy, and argue in French than listening to anglophone lyrics or even classical music (and no, silence is not an option; I am miserable without music). I've gone through most of my friends' recommendations for good Francophone pop artists (and am actively seeking new suggestions, if you have them!) and have returned to the classics: Brel, Piaf, and Gainsbourg. I just realized that Gainsbourg wrote an album called "Rock Around the Bunker" about the Nazi era, Hitler, Eva Braun (yes, there's a song called "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" about her which, like the rest of the album, is in pretty dubious taste), yellow stars, and what happens when an SS officer escapes to Uruguay (he wears a flat straw hat and drinks papaya juice, duh). I don't exactly know what to think of this little album- it's very different from the rest of Serge's stuff, which is mostly nouvelle-vague, full of breathy jazz and suave innuendos and impossible coolness. This album, instead, has music that seems plucked from either the King or the Beach Boys' cutting floor, complete with singing backup bimbos; the lyrics are sparse and full of silly puns that at first seem innocuous. But Gainsbourg sings his soda shop melodies with intensities; he spits his satiric jeux de mots with anger at the injustice and the wrong and the horror. This album came out in 1975, a little before Shoah and then Schindler's List made Holocaust memorial both mainstream and serious. Gainsbourg, who was a kid during World War II and wore a yellow star in Paris, remembers his own experience and that of his country and his continent with angry humor: this is not the goofy, pretzel-and-iron-cross-sporting chorus girls and effeminate Adolf of "Springtime for Hitler", nor the jerky, silly Little Dictator, nor the wide range of lightening-bolt-sporting absurdity in "Allo Allo"; but neither is this the unequivocally sad, sometimes moralizing gaze one finds in the two films I just mentioned (as well as Au revoir, les enfants, and even The Sound of Music). This is infuriated laughter. It's interesting to see this kind of goofy, deadly serious satire, especially from the French singer most noted for his cool detachment (he was perhaps the only man who could let Brigitte Bardot go at the height of her beauty with very little ruffling of his feathers). We don't do memory like this much any more.

(Actually, it would be interesting to see if Congolese rappers do. I wouldn't be surprised. Music is a funny, furious medium.)

Okay, well anyway. Gainsbourg's songs about the SS have little to do with ice cream and sunshine, nor with the ethics of economic theory. Back to work, and laissant le beau temps rouler (sans et avec moi). 

La vie expatique

I just had a beautiful walk near Flagey, which is both home and not-home now. Tonight is exceptionally balmy and almost warm; it was one of the first nights you could walk around the Etangs d'Ixelles and through the pretty windy streets around here without dashing through the rain or running for warmth and shelter because it's bitter cold. The one good thing about Brussels weather- a schizophrenic mix of drizzle, downpour, and fits of teasing sunshine-and-cloud before drizzle or downpour- is that it makes you (and most Bruxellois) appreciate the days-or parts of days-or half-hours-or fifteen minutes- of good weather that exist on rare occasions. Tonight, for example, all the spindly metal chairs were out on the terraces; people were talking, swigging beer, laughing, tipsily saluting the trench-coated American with the "beau sourire," milling about on the streets and on the terraces and (currently) heatedly discussing something about music choice under my window (the last of these is less charming, admittedly). I walked past an apartment out of whose window wafted chamber music that might have been played live; I was simultaneously jealous and charmed. Nights like these, full of soft spring breeze and snatches of music and the strange-but-familiar smells of evaporating rain, deep-fried pomme frites, moldering tulips, blossoming trees, and dissipating cigarette smoke, make me happy, very happy, to be twenty-three and alive and in Brussels and able to call this place home for two years.

If you've talked to me in the past few weeks, the preceding paragraph might surprise you. I've been morose and sometimes even angry about three successive weeks of terrible weather here (which has, more often than not, caught me while riding Leo. Fun fact: if you ride a scooter in a trench coat in the rain, and if you forget your scarf while doing so, the rain feels like little hail-bullets when it hits your throat. Ouch.) Hail Bullet Rain has combined with three papers that have been hanging over my head and keeping me in to read Levinas and Arendt and Kant when I'd rather be doing Artsy Fun European things. Rain and work have in turn encouraged a bout of homesickness  deep enough that no amount of gaufres, biere, priceless art, ancient architecture, glorious music, alternative culture, Francophone poetry, or even complicated history could greatly improve.  The banality of expat life hit in full force: I've found myself loathing laundry at the laundromat (uphill both ways, by a psychiatric ward), two-hour lectures in monotone French, page 178 of 190 of a book on ECJ law I'm editing (the page on trademark cases), the temperamental oven in the apartment which won't keep both top and bottom burners lit, the weird, confusing, super-strict three-bag system for taking out trash, and the constant squishy feeling of smelly, wet sock-and-shoe that slips on the cheap linoleum at ULB and makes me fear for my bag and my back. Hours and days and months spent in French and in Brussels can make one ache for American English, Southern English, for strawberry shortcake and real iced tea and grilled Vidalia onions on the back deck, for the wafting smell of citronella, not cigarette, for home in the "Oh, Auntie Em!" sense of the word.

Tonight I went to the Brussels premiere of "Bon baisers de la colonie", a docu-film about Suzanne, une métisse (her father was a Belgian colonial official, her mother a Rwandan noblewoman) whose father removed her from Rwanda as a child and who spent most of her life in Brussels, on the outskirts and then on the outs with her Belgian family while at the same time hesitant to contact or return to her Rwandan one. The filmwas funny and moving and profound but also somewhat unoriginally "white girl discovers complicated family history and saves the part-African members of said family from their ignorance." It focuses on Suzanne's (white, Belgian) niece, who interviews most of her extended family about the mystery of her black aunt. Said niece then goes to Rwanda to track down Suzanne's brother, a Rwandan named Jacques who looks startingly like their Belgian father and still uses his last name. Suzanne and Jacques are reunited via the magic of phone conversations and Skype; their chats are poignant and funny and awkward, as chats should be after almost seventy years out of touch. But the most interesting scene comes at the end, as the niece-director asks Suzanne if she feels Belgian. "Oui, euh, non" she responds. "I'm really not from anywhere." She adds, laughing, "I know my Rwandan family is much cooler (plus chouette) than my Belgian one (she hated her Belgian mother-in-law)." But that said, despite her Rwandan family's superior chouette-ness, she made and has to date expressed little desire to return to her homeland.

Suzanne's story is full of bitterness and heartache and complicated, often secret, histories that someone like myself can feel sad about but can't pretend to understand. The head of a cultural group focusing on métissage in Belgium said, "Métissage has always been the most difficult cultural phenomenon for societies, especially colonial societies, to understand and explain and categorize. By definition, someone who is half black and half white (and thus in colonial-speak half superior, half inferior, half developed, half backwards, half ruling class, half ruled class) challenges the entire logic (or lack thereof) of the power structure, the social rules, the economic hierarchy. Métissage makes people uncomfortable. It's the clearest example of the fact that cultural and geographic boundaries- and the assumptions that come with them- aren't as static as we'd like to think."

I haven't considered the role of métissage in talking about colonial history much yet, so it was cool to think about that more (in addition to well-established tire tracks about the white narrator filtering all these great métissage stories so that her marshmallowy audience could ingest them). I also have very little idea what métissage feels like, looks like, the social dynamics that make it complicated and complicating. But the idea of home being far-off, distant, of wondering how much of it you made up in your head and how much of it really happened and continues to happen- that, I am beginning to understand. I am starting to feel the warm wonderful weariness of being able to call some place in Europe home- the wonder at its pretty, strange familiarity, the frustration at its soaked habitual-ness. At the same time, I am starting to question how much of the country I represent I actually really remember. I check myself sometimes as I talk about the South, realizing that I'm not really describing the traffic-choked, Starbucks-guzzling, "Mexican" food-eating, screen-on-the-greening suburb I come from but instead a silly cocktail which is equal parts Tara and the Southern Baptist Convention and the World of Coke. It's hard not to reduce something as complex as "home" to stereotypes, especially when "home" is becoming two places, or really multiple places, scattered across the Western hemisphere like Orange-Monster-visited specks. It's harder still when "home", the original "home", becomes something that's equal parts freshly-lived and distantly-remembered experience; when memories meld with old sentiments, old frustrations, old delights; when you catch the slippage of the language you're using but can't stop it slipping. Maybe Suzanne had a point when she refused to talk about Rwanda and kept saying she "couldn't remember." Maybe part of the point was: you can never really talk about home. Home is complicated, often frustrating and wonderful and painful and missed and moved-out-of. Representing it means talking in broad brushstrokes and leaving a lot out. Feeling your words about your origins slip on the cheapness of small talk is unnerving, frustrating, demoralizing.

And yet Suzanne eventually did talk, did give what she would and could remember about a past a lot of people had tried to have her forget. She said negative things about her dubious step-family but spoke fondly of the country which she'd adopted as her own, where she'd grown up, survived a world war, met and married her husband and had three kids of her own. For her, as for many many other expats who've either strived or struggled to come to Brussels, this city has been a frustrating but familiar second home. Its complicated, absurd, temperamental culture and politics (only rivaled by its weather) create a rumpus where it's maybe easier to slide in and be yourself and someone new. It's a special, soggy place, this city and this country, often disorganized or over-organized but often quite (and sometimes too) forgiving as well.

Bon, ça suffit. The music-debaters have quieted down and I've got a heap of laundry on my bed to fold. Vive la vie expatique :)

Memories of memories, etc. Also lots of run-on sentences. You've been forewarned.

Well, it's really really been too long.

As a brief summary: I have been enjoying my post-mono freedom and health so much that I've not found the time to sit down and write. But I have found the time to go to Berlin with the Davidson crew, celebrate carnival in Nivelles with some good Belgians and some good Americans, too, have three wonderful sets of guests visit, start working for an EU lawyer, submit a thesis proposal, get a thesis advisor and two readers, begin the RMCA renovation project in earnest, get almost halfway through a second semester of classes, survive the frozen-solid winter and welcome spring, become an almost-competent quiche and omelette maker, and become a master at getting last-minute opera, theatre, and concert tickets.

So yeah, it's been fun.

First: exams and mono. I never realized how much of an effect health had on me until I didn't have it anymore. In fact, I didn't realize how much effect non-health had until the Etangs d'Ixelles melted, the sun came out (literally), and mono disappeared, leaving me capable of climbing the stairs to my apartment without panting, capable of doing classes (and internship, and job) without passing out afterwards, able to run around Bois de la Cambre with only limited difficulty, able to wear more than PJs and eat more than frozen cheese pizza. Life is very, very good when you no longer have mono. And while I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, especially during exams in a foreign country, mono has taught me some valuable lessons about human anatomy, especially the lymphatic system, as well as about how long you can wait until doing laundry is absolutely necessary, about how many things you can put into water to get it to stop tasting so much like water (hint: not as many as you think), about the incomparable goodness of speculoos ice cream, about being vulnerable, about gritting your teeth and getting through tough things, about what is absolutely necessary in life (hint: painting your toenails is not one of those things), and about how great good health and good friends are. So yay.

Also: Belgian fries and Belgian beer are even better when you return to them after a long hiatus. You don't know what you've got till it's gone...and then returned.

Second: Berlin. What a crazy, cool, complicated city. I presented for/tagged along with the Davidson Holocaust seminar for a week, which was probably one of the best (and most intense, and sometimes most depressing) ways to get a sense for the complexity of this city's history. It was fascinating to see what's there: bullet marks in buildings; sections of the Wall, graffitied or muraled, dotting big empty streets; the pretty modernist Philharmonic (and yes, hearing Beethoven's Sixth played by the Berliner Philharmonie was pretty much a life goal and pretty much transcendent); the nauseatingly pretty villa at Wannsee, where Nazi superiors coordinated the Final Solution; the Museumsinsel, sublime by moonlight; the towering, red-triangle-dotted GDR-era obelisk at Sachesenhausen; the glowing, glimmering, capitalist-choked Potsdamer Platz (complete with life-sized Lego giraffe, which was awesome); people milling around the glass dome of the Reichstag like marbles spinning in a giant maze; the weeping grey blocks of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe; the warm-lit Brandenburg Gate, and the incredible realization that for most of their lives my parents and my grandparents would not have been able to see the faces on the horses and the chariot driver up top; the armed-to-the-teeth British and US embassies; the big, weird, Jetson-y TV Tower; the nauseating feeling at the glass coverings over the former Nazi prisons; the cool, surreal U-Bahn ride across the Spree to my apartment in Friedrischain; the countless falafel stands; the equally-countless ads for hair gel (Berliners like their hair colorful and/or spiky).

But what mesmerized me even more was what wasn't there, and that's the mystery of Berlin: remembering all the many layers of dramatic history, whose drama has in many cases intentionally or unintentionally erased the chapters that went before them. And so there are gravel rectangles in place of barracks at Sachsenhausen; there are black and white photos of the SS at Wannsee, but no furniture; there are odd-shaped bricks to mark the snaking trail of the Wall, but (with a few exceptions) no Wall; there is a really inconvenient construction site (soon to be a really unfortunate reconstruction of an old Prussian palace), but no GDR-era Palast der Republik (and that's worth an essay in and of itself); there's the gold dome of the Jewish Synagogue, but no sanctuary; there's a Jewish Museum, but the part of Jewish history we (and by we I mean Americans, especially Americans who study genocide and the Holocaust, like I do) study is represented there by voids, echoes, troubling metal faces (also an essay. I have a lot of writing to catch up on); there's silvery signs showing where Bismarck-era state buildings once stood; or where Third Reich monstrosities got burned (or got converted into current offices, because, recycling, I guess?); or where Checkpoint Charlie still stands but got all covered up by the very worst of profit-driven tourism (drive a real life Trabi! Sit in a real life East German living room! There's probably some irony to the fact that those Gatlinburg-level excesses probably lead to more anti-capitalist sentiment than any GDR propaganda ever did).

And then there was what wasn't there at all: there was little or no mention of Germany's colonies. Admittedly, Germany's colonial past gets understandably overshadowed by the drama that follows; and admittedly, there was one little sign that talked about the Berlin Conference, the division of Africa, and German colonialism; and admittedly, I spent so much time at Dahlem (the ethnological museum) that I didn't make it to the German History Museum to see if there was a section on colonialism (major regret: one of many reasons to go back). But that said, as Hannah Arendt figured out long before I thought about it, the ways imperialism in general and the Herero genocide in particular paved the way for the brutality of both World Wars and the Holocaust is disturbing and compelling; leaving out colonialism is chopping the story in half. I'm becoming more and more convinced that the story of 20th century Europe can't be told without the gilded, gory end of the 19th century, full of optimism and expansionism and internationalism and humanitarianism and racism and dreams for a New World Order and worries about one's place in that order. I was sometimes sad that I didn't see those links show up at the memorial, or Sachsenhausen, or Dahlem; that I never heard the story of the ways that Westerners (Germans, here, most pertinently, but also Belgians, Brits, French, Italians, and in sneaky and unsneaky ways Americans) dehumanized "the others" and so dehumanized themselves, enabling them to do unspeakable violence with unthinkable detachment to themselves and all the "others" they encountered (and I'm of course thinking about the transport trains, but also about trenches in Ypres, and firebombings in Dresden, and blockades after the Treaty of Versailles, and torture in Guantanamo, and drones in Pakistan, too).

So yeah, I would have liked to hear that story. But there were already a lot of stories- a lot of complicated, layered stories- in Berlin (what does one do with that awkward GDR museum to political victims of Sachsenhausen, after all? Demolish it? Dismantle parts of it? Leave it intact, a museum of a museum?). So much food for thought. And also so much food. Good food. I ate apples in so many good pastry ways. (No, no schnitzel. I'm still a vegetarian, which isn't easy to do in Berlin. Also, I'm pretty sure schnitzel is Austrian).

Post-Berlin, it's been a whirlwind: the renovation project has kicked into full gear; I've interviewed a cool group of Congolese students and a few professors about what their ideal colonial history exhibit would look like; have worked on a book about the European Court of Justice; have ridden Leo all over the place; have run, picnicked, frolicked, and basked in the spring weather (which is currently hiding but which will hopefully come back soon); have bashed my head against French philosophy and criticism with increasing frequency (oh Derrida you are no more comprehensible in French than in English); have bought and wore (with trepidation) some banana-yellow pants; and have had so much fun with so many guests. It's been great. I should write more (for example, about the entirely too trippy and confusing version of the Little Mermaid-named-Rusalka, but don't be deceived, it was straight-up Ariel all the way, sort of), but it's late, and I have to go to Tervuren in the morning, and let's face it: when there are this many memories, you've got to pick and choose and eventually end your run-on sentence and shut up.
(And yes, that is probably on some level what all these memory-and-museum questions are all about.)

On research, blackouts, and the thrill of the chase

So, the internet (or, rather, the people that use the internet) has been freaking out today about the SOPA act, which as I understand it (based on very brief browsing in between bouts of exam studying) is a bill proposed in Congress (the US Congress) that intends to cut down on copyright infringement but also severely limits the autonomy and free speech of websites such as Wikipedia, Google, Hulu, and the artsy-quirky McSweeny's (whose current SOPA blackout protest page is one of the wittier ways to speak out against the legislating man). Congress is debating SOPA now, and while Obama is opposed to the act, a lot of people in government (and in Hollywood, where the MPAA has been saying some rather nasty stuff about the internet and internauts) are not.

I honestly probably wouldn't be paying that much attention to this whole debate (besides noting the myriad facebook status updates, shrugging, and returning to my ethics studying) except for the fact that I went to go look up several famous ethics cases on Wikipedia today and instead received this rude awakening: oh no! What would I do? Surely there was no other website anywhere that can tell me about the Tuskeegee Syphilis Scandal!

That's when I (and many of my peers) realized how dependent I've become on Wikipedia. I turn there to do pre-research sleuthing before I dive into a paper topic; go there to fact check when I blog; rely on it, often, to settle dinner-party disputes about obscure topics. It's a wonderful, crazy resource; wonderful in that it is a treasure trove of relatively well-researched and well-monitored general information, and crazy in that it is free.

But as I paged through the messier interfaces of other websites about my topics, I realized that Wikipedia sometimes makes life too easy. It's convenient to have one site to turn to for quick-fix answers to all of your factual questions, a clean white site neatly organized and easily searchable. However, in turning from Wikipedia to other websites I found fascinating things that would never make it past Wikipedia's editors: personal accounts from Tuskeegee; black-and-white photos of Willowbrook High School; a long, passionate defense from Ashley (the Pillow Angel's) parents about their decision to artificially stunt their handicapped daughter's growth. It's not that this information wasn't there before; it's that, often, my time-maximizing ways would have led me to Wikipedia, to consult the "Ashley Case" page, get my answer, and leave (or continue hotlinking to other Wikipedia articles ad nauseum :) Today, since I wasn't able to do that, I dug deeper, past the test answers to the stories, the faces, and the emotional struggle behind the ethical dilemmas.

And that got me thinking about a scene from Spielberg's Tintin movie (which is really cute and worth seeing if you're bored or babysitting a small child). Towards the beginning, the intrepid boy reporter buys a model ship which brings with it a whole lot of adventure, mystery, and apartment break-ins. Curious about the ship's history, Tintin visits the library (which is beautiful, historic, and very European-looking; sadly, there's nothing like it that I've found in Brussels). He combs through shelf after shelf of books before finding old dusty books of maps, ships, and naval history; he pores over the books until - sapristi! - he finds the story's he's been looking for. There's something about that struggle to find an answer - the hunt, the frustration, the mental (and, sometimes, physical) challenge, the irritation at the gaps in the narrative, and the incredible rush of adrenaline and accomplishment that comes with turning the page and finally finding the missing piece - which sometimes gets lost in an age where everything is digitized and at one's fingertips. There's nothing remarkable about the non-effort of looking something up on Wikipedia (well, not now); and while Wikipedia is doing incredibly cool, important work, democratizing information that used to be the province of scholars with access to prissy European libraries, there's a little nostalgic part of me that wishes, sometimes, that we had more opportunity - or maybe just incentive - to play Tintin in the library.

(Of course, there are plenty of things that aren't on Wikipedia, or the Internet, or even published in books yet; and that's why one does academic research. There are also a lot of shoddily researched and written things on the Internet, and on Wikipedia; and that's why libraries and publishing houses won't be closing any time soon, even if they all go digital.)

There's another, less-technophobic reason that the research chase is thrilling. It's fun because you never know what rabbit trails will come up; what random book is lying next to the one you think you want; what treasures a poorly designed website on your topic might hold; or, honestly, what hot link might be lurking in your Wikipedia article, ready to whisk you off to an even more pertinent article. The fun of research isn't just filling in gaps in your story; it's realizing that there are other stories, and that those stories are often more fascinating and challenging than the one you're constructing.

Research tools, and the freedom to use those tools, enable that kind of eager, open quest for knowledge.  Enabling as many people as possible to understand the visceral joy of finding out not only the information they want to find but new information they never dreamed of finding is a noble goal that is in keeping with a democracy's goals of educating all its citizens, regardless of financial circumstance or educational background. SOPA (at least in its current, censor-y form) is thus striking at the heart of a very important part of who we as a nation are, limiting the access of many for the rights of a wealthy few without thought to productive compromises that could preserve both groups' interests.

That said, blackouts aren't always the worst thing in the world. Sometimes, having to change the way you look for something changes the way you see it, too.


On a somewhat-related note: an adorable stop-motion film clip on the magic of (real, printed, Kindle-free) books and the imagination that stories (in any form) inspire: