Dia de los Muertos

2010.11.01
Days Remaining: 210

1. So I've been profoundly unproductive, blog-wise, for the past 3 weeks. Some of this has been due to getting very, very busy, especially with grading (3 classes in full swing can lead to a massive influx of essays each week). In the midst of all of that I had a trip to Delaware, and then following that I had a very difficult (not a plea for sympathy, btw, just reporting what was going on) run of days centered around the 21st of October, which was the 4th anniversary of my wedding. It was also the day when my ex-wife returned my wedding ring (it arrived that day, I didn't pick it up until Monday 25 October). This combination kind of sucked my energy down quite a bit, and on Tuesday I dove back into working and grading. So the last week or so was exhausted, and the ones preceding just busy.

2. Before going any further, a birthday shout out to Octavius (30 October) and Belisarius (01 November). Both are now 35; we three were all born within 6.5 weeks of one another (Octavius eldest, me youngest), and so Mischief Night every year is the day when I actually begin to feel like I'm growing older. I've never been particularly concerned about aging; I know people who are majorly concerned about it, but I've had trouble keeping track of my own age (I often, if asked without preparation, am off by a year or two) for years now. I had gray hair when I was 10, apparently from stress as it faded as I lived past the aftermaths of the divorce, but my paternal uncle had gray hair in high school, and so I had an expectation that I would go gray early. In fact, I didn't. My beard now has two distinct white-ish areas that, because in this at least I'm lucky, are developing into two parallel bars from the corners of my mouth downwards to my chin, framing a still-dark center stripe. They are roughly symmetrical, approximately the same size, and their only downside is that during my recent visit to Delaware, my beloved niece, Iunia, informed me that I should "make the white hairs brown." Sigh. I shall remain firm, though, in resisting her order. I don't mind aging. It's natural.

3. Speaking of my niece brings to mind my nephew, Euander, who won the AC Moore costume contest on Saturday past, in his guise as "Dancy" (his choice of names) the Robot. Congratulations, kiddo!

4. It's growing colder here, we had unseasonably warm days at the beginning of last week, but around Thursday the nighttime temperatures began dropping into the 50s, and then by Saturday night into the 40s. I still leave my tiny window open all day to keep fresh air coming in, but haven't opened the sliding glass doors in days. This temperature shift was caused by a massive cold front that blew through, and led to an enormous amount of wind the past few days. I actually thought, twice, that someone in my building had a major plumbing disaster because of the sudden onset of what sounded, to me, like rushing water. It was, in fact, enormously powerful and sustained winds blowing through the trees near my building. I mention the weather so frequently in these posts because I am confined, when working, to an interior lifestyle, and thus think a lot about the world outside. I'm not just including filler.

5. Over the past week or so I was invited to give 3 talks on campus (2 in dorms and 1 to a local public school students mentoring group) on "Scary Stories." This has grown out of my "Supernatural in American Popular Culture" course (offered last Autumn and again this upcoming Spring), and I do my best to not only tell "true" scary stories but to inject some critical thinking on the subject into the presentation. The stories are all "true" insofar as I focus as much as possible on firsthand accounts of personal experiences with ghosts, night hags, house spirits, and so on. I warn the students that I cannot personally vouch for the meaning or proper interpretation of any of the events I narrate, and we discuss some of the options that are available. What I love about this each year is the way in which stories I tell almost always trigger responses from my audiences, who begin raising their hands and saying things like, "One time I was in my cousin's house..." It's also fun to actually scare some folks (last year one of my students ended up needing to be walked back to her room, in the same dorm, because she didn't want to be alone - she didn't even need to go outside); this year I had in two different sessions people curling up in each others' laps and one person actually yelled out loud when I got to the conclusion. I firmly believe that Halloween should involve an element of eeriness, which one can turn into either fear or exhilaration (preferably oscillating between the two). I gave the 3rd talk last night, and so I got to see what Halloween looks like on Baskerville College's campus. Basically, it was dark and pretty quiet. Granted, it was a Sunday evening, but I was still expecting more going on. Another bonus: I heard about ghostlore on campus, one story from which actually said that one my classrooms this semester is haunted, and that my office building is haunted as well. Creepiest story I heard? Apparently a long-standing patron of the college's theater department attended plays in the campus theater (was seen by multiple witnesses and spoke with several people) for up to 6 months after she died. Her various interlocutors didn't know that she was dead, and apparently neither did she.

6. In case anyone is following after the long lacuna, I did read the Story Waiting To Pierce You about which I wrote in my last post, and once again was struck by the combination of acute analytical intelligence and totally self-serving, answer-predetermined, argument. Because Kingsley is very smart, I was on guard reading the book, and had to parse out as I was doing so why certain logical progressions were defensible and others were not. It takes a great deal of energy to do this with his books, and it's one of the few times where being widely-read and familiar with a range of texts is almost a necessity for dealing responsibly with a single text. His arguments and evidence were all over the map, sometimes justly, and sometimes less so, and so I couldn't simply dismiss things about which I was skeptical, or accept things that I thought sounded good. I had to prove/defend every critical response I had. Still, it was elegantly written and the stuff worth taking away from it was really worth taking away.

7. On the topic of books, the author of one of my favorite books of all time (Ceremony), Leslie Marmon Silko, has just released a memoir, The Turquoise Ledge, her first book in over 10 years. I am sometimes guilty of a typical tendency in mainstream American culture to romanticize the Southwest. Why that area in particular strikes so many people as being distinctively spiritual, interesting, and even seductive is unclear to me, but somehow the deserts and mountains of New Mexico often fit into New Age speculations, back-to-the-land movements, and certain type of hipster aesthetics. Given that I've only driven through the area once, when en route to California with my family in 1993, and we were really in Colorado, not New Mexico, my abstract affection for it really must be a combination of cultural knowledge (things we all "know" about the Southwest) and what I've read, specifically the novel Ceremony and several short stories by Leslie Marmon Silko. I think that one of the biggest draws for me is how pervasively hybrid the cultures there are: Spanish, Anglo, Native American (of various sorts), African American sources are all present and overlapping, and rather than blending seamlessly they sort of co-exist in a complicated cultural stew (not so much a melting pot). All of that takes place against a backdrop of clear light and achingly beautiful landscapes (plus coyotes!), and I am, at least, intrigued. Anyway, Silko's memoir is apparently a mix of family histories, nature observations, and religious autobiography, and I cannot wait to read it.

8. I'm also excited by the release of a very neat album by Jordi Savall and the Tembembe Ensemble Continuo titled El Nuevo Mundo, which consists of songs from the time of Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica, and works to show the ways that this led to the creolization of Spanish music by incorporating Mesoamerican and African elements into Spanish music, and Spanish and African elements into Mesoamerican music. The best part is that it costs $24.98 on Amazon.com and $9.99 on iTunes. I heard a review of it on NPR last week, and was really impressed. I'm not a huge fan of classical music, at least not enough to put the time and effort into having a strong intellectual grasp of it, but I know what I like. In two weeks I get paid, and I'll have a new book and a new album.

9. Moving on from my gross consumerism, something else has been on my mind quite a bit lately. After the rash of nationally-reported suicides by LGBTQ teens last month, the LGBTQ Center at Baskerville College sponsored a "Teach-In" about LGBTQ issues both on campus and in general. I was personally invited by two of my students who were presenting, so of course I went. The event was interesting, to say the least, and extremely well attended (it was standing room only in the back). One element that I found particularly interesting and even a bit troubling was that many of the presenters expressed a strong dislike (to the point of rejection) of the word/concept "tolerance" or "toleration." This was developed in various presentations as a critique of the inadequacy of tolerance (since one tolerates what one does not like or finds offensive) and an argument that we should be aiming towards "embracing." One presenter articulated this by saying that parents of LGBTQ kids "should love their kids because their kids are LGBTQ." So here is where I become troubled: I would have said, "love them because they're your kids." I can imagine laws that prevent (or regulate) intolerant behavior (exclusion, bullying, etc.) but I don't know how one can possibly actively coerce people into being accepting. The race-focused Civil Rights act makes this clear (though obviously there are a host of specific factors that differentiate the two situations): we can police racism, but we can't stop people from being prejudiced. I was struck, at this teach-in, by the question of whether or not tolerance and the development of supporting community structures in addition to the existing biased community structures would be adequate, or whether we need to do something far more penetrating to properly assist our LGBTQ citizens. But if it's the latter, I have no idea how to do it in a focused purposive way. I'm also uncomfortable telling people that they are "wrong" to be homophobic. I can argue with specific homophobic claims (about marriage, adoption, military service, safe sex, etc.), I even feel comfortable speculating about the historic and cultural roots of pervasive homophobia, but to me the best we can do at a macro level is address this through anti-discrimination laws and the egalitarian enforcement of the Bill of Rights (equal protection, etc.). I don't know how to make people less homophobic. I do know how to make sure that they cannot manifest their homophobia in explicit/direct fashion. I can't make people like this situation, though. And I'm not sure that I would have the right to do so, even if I knew how to do it. Like I said, I can bring suit against someone for discriminating against a racial or gender minority and thereby violating federal law. But I don't know how to bring suit against someone because they believe, in their own heads, that African Americans or Women or any group are somehow inferior. I will argue with them vociferously on this, but that's not coercive, it's attempting (usually unsuccessfully) to be persuasive. Hrm.

10.Well, that's enough for now. I'll work on updating more regularly from now on. I just had a lot on my mind the past few weeks, and not enough time on my hands.