2010.04.18
400 Days Remaining
01. I'm grading essays for Medieval Philosophy right now, and am very tired. But I have been focusing my grading energies the past few weeks on the Supernatural class (especially regarding writing) and so I need to catch up on MPh essays. I should be done soon, or maybe I'll finish up tomorrow morning.
02. Today I did a bunch of stuff around my apartment, paid bills, edited some stuff, made some phone calls (the city of Wilmington decided that I hadn't paid a parking ticket which I definitely paid, and so they sent me a letter explaining, very politely, that they would boot my car the next time they caught me. When I called and finally, after 15 minutes, got to the right department, I was told that they had no idea why I had been sent this letter, it was all taken care of, and I could come to Wilmington without the threat of vehicular incapacitation - they'd better be right), etc. These are the minor but persistent tasks and issues that define life. I experience an aesthetic pleasure in accomplishing things like that: seeing a completely cleared off table, all tasks on it finished, all bills paid, etc. There's a virtue to work, and too much leisure can become a problem.
03. I watched the film The Brothers Bloom this evening (around, under, and behind the grading) and am not quite sure what to think. It's charming and clever up until 2/3 of the way through, and then it gets complicated and somewhat dark. The two sections aren't unrelated, and there are some very interesting undergirding themes throughout, but I was surprised (not disappointed) by how it ended. I recommend it. I also recommend the soundtrack, which is almost entirely instrumental (a song played over the credits has lyrics) and brass-band, vaguely jazzish, and very distinctive.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
And so it goes
2010.04.17
401 Days Remaining
01. A lot of interesting things have happened during my two month blog hiatus, and I don't know if I can recall all of them at the moment. For now I'll focus on last weekend, when my Supernatural in American Popular Culture class did our overnight Ghost Hunting (in an auditorium/theater on campus which is reputed to be haunted). We were accompanied by a Campus Safety officer who has his own paranormal research group, and who is the other guy who does scary storytelling sessions for dorm groups around Halloween each year. We got started around 10pm (having had to wait for the Dance Department's rehearsal to end), and kept up all the way to 4am. The officer and I took groups of students (from 6 to 12 per group) onto the stage of the auditorium in the very low light, and proceeded to run through a series of observations (looking for shadowy figures, odd lights, etc.) and questions ("is there anyone present?" etc.) which are typical of the ways that most pop cultural paranormal research groups operate. The students seem to have had a good time, and I found it fascinating to observe, firsthand, exactly how silly these procedures are. I'm not in any way opposed to paranormal research, but if this is how these groups operate, they aren't actually doing paranormal research. We were three steps away from Spiritualist seances, in terms of method. Still, it was a great deal of fun and pedagogically very useful.
02. Last night I returned to the auditorium to attend the Senior Thesis Dance Concert held by the Dance Department each Spring (three of my students were in it and they invited me). I am uncertain how to describe the experience; I suppose the easiest thing to say is that I don't speak dance. I was often confused or unsure what, if anything, I was supposed to be getting out of the performances. I don't mean that they were unpleasant or nonsensical, I really felt like I was not speaking the language, because the rest of the audience (made up of non-seniors, professors, and family members) seemed to laugh all at the same times, or to find the same moves or sequences meaningful in a way I did not. I was most impressed by a few pieces which were rather atypical of the performance as a whole; two were solo pieces and the other by a trio (that one was not set to music and was apparently originally choreographed by Twyla Tharp).
03. One sequence (in one of the pieces I couldn't substantially grasp) in which several dancers were encouraging someone else (who was clearly, at that moment, the audience's intended focal point) to do something...it got me thinking about visual and somatic ways to represent the theory of mind I've been developing for a long while, where "ego" is a position rather than a thing, and the various internal sub-personalities which constitute us (all of our discrete drives, memories, aversions, habits, etc. are fragments out of which each one of us is constructed) contest one another to occupy the lead position. I may go and talk to the Dance Department faculty and see if anyone has worked on using dance to communicate and explore ideas like that. I've seen someone use masks to make a similar (but not identical) point.
04. Something else that has been on my mind lately: the new Arthur film (about which I've heard consistently bad things). At some point when I was a kid I saw (at least large parts of) the original Arthur, starring Dudley Moore, but I was too young (or my viewing of it was too fragmented) for me to have anything more than a vague sense of the characters or plot. I noted weeks ago that it was available for streaming/viewing on Netflix, and so I watched it while working on other things (mostly grading). I remembered a few scenes with some vividness, but upon watching the film now I have discovered that I mis-remembered their sequence, significance and, in one case, the characters involved. The movie I partially mis-remembered was somewhat more complicated regarding character development (Arthur's fiancee, Susan, is more sympathetic and rounded in my imagined version). There is one scene where Arthur's prospective father-in-law, Burt, tells Arthur that, when Burt was 11, he killed a man who tried to steal food from Burt's family. For reasons I cannot imagine, in my inaccurate memory I thought that scene was an important point in establishing Burt as a character with perspective and sympathy who was encouraging Arthur's maturation (in my mis-memory the scene occurs late in the film). In fact, in the actual movie, Burt was threatening to kill Arthur if Arthur hurt Burt's daughter, and was infantilizing him in the process. I still prefer my mis-remembered version of that scene.
05. Over the past few weeks I've somehow drawn the attention of several of the faculty involved in Baskerville College's Center for Teaching and Learning, an in-house group focused on improving teaching skills for professors in order to make the classroom experience as productive as possible. I've been invited to participate in several their programs, once as a presenter, and have generally enjoyed it. I've also noticed that the same people (about a dozen professors) tend to come to the sessions, which someone else commented on as indicating that the people who care are already there, whereas folks who don't care about teaching as much aren't motivated to attend. This is troubling on any number of levels, but I suspect it's true.
06. I've been spending a lot of time the last several weekends going over rough drafts of essays by my Supernatural students. Their weekly essays started off strong but then began to decline in quality after about a month, and I began requiring rough drafts from those who were declining most precipitously. Literally, for the past three weekends, I've spent at least 8 hours a day going over rough drafts (sometimes multiple iterations of one essay) and working to instill in my students a better understanding of how and why to write some things and not others. I commented to Belisarius the other night that I'm trying to cram four years of Mt Pleasant's honors writing courses' content into a single college semester. I'm not a huge fan of repetition and enforced structure, but I do believe that they are necessary, even if only as a stage from which one eventually graduates, having internalized the important conceptual and practical tools they require you to learn. My students don't accidentally write good essays, and they often have not received anything like the basic training in writing that I did in high school. And, on the upside, it's working. The rough drafts are overall improving, several students require fewer of them to get to a good final draft, and they are clearly seeing the benefit of it in their grades, having done the extra but necessary work.
07. This year's vernal allergy season has been particularly awful, and I've been taking Benadryl (or the Target generic version, which is much less expensive) daily for almost a month now. I've actually woken up a few times from a sound sleep asphyxiating because the mucus membranes in my nose are swollen completely closed, which has never happened before that I can recall. I love spring time, and we seem to finally be moving into steadily warmer weather (yesterday was the only exception to this), but the allergies are hell.
08. Something that occurred two Fridays ago, and which I feel deserves some mention: I received an email from my exing-wife saying that her cat, Jasper, had died. He was 18 years old. I am not aware of the specific circumstances of his death (I assume he was euthanized), but I had known that his condition was deteriorating this past year. He and I lived together for roughly 3 years, and knew each other for a year before becoming housemates. He was a grumpy, gluttonous old bastard (Iunia and Euander, in particular, found him frightening and ogre-like), and I'm sad about his death. He loved my exing-wife ferociously, and she loved him; they were together for 18 years, longer than any other relationship she's had. Whenever she was traveling he would stop eating for the first couple days (and this cat loved food only slightly less than he loved her) until resignation kicked in and he took solace in eating. One of my great fears throughout my marriage was that he would die while she was away, and so I'm glad they were together when he died. I know he'll be missed.
401 Days Remaining
01. A lot of interesting things have happened during my two month blog hiatus, and I don't know if I can recall all of them at the moment. For now I'll focus on last weekend, when my Supernatural in American Popular Culture class did our overnight Ghost Hunting (in an auditorium/theater on campus which is reputed to be haunted). We were accompanied by a Campus Safety officer who has his own paranormal research group, and who is the other guy who does scary storytelling sessions for dorm groups around Halloween each year. We got started around 10pm (having had to wait for the Dance Department's rehearsal to end), and kept up all the way to 4am. The officer and I took groups of students (from 6 to 12 per group) onto the stage of the auditorium in the very low light, and proceeded to run through a series of observations (looking for shadowy figures, odd lights, etc.) and questions ("is there anyone present?" etc.) which are typical of the ways that most pop cultural paranormal research groups operate. The students seem to have had a good time, and I found it fascinating to observe, firsthand, exactly how silly these procedures are. I'm not in any way opposed to paranormal research, but if this is how these groups operate, they aren't actually doing paranormal research. We were three steps away from Spiritualist seances, in terms of method. Still, it was a great deal of fun and pedagogically very useful.
02. Last night I returned to the auditorium to attend the Senior Thesis Dance Concert held by the Dance Department each Spring (three of my students were in it and they invited me). I am uncertain how to describe the experience; I suppose the easiest thing to say is that I don't speak dance. I was often confused or unsure what, if anything, I was supposed to be getting out of the performances. I don't mean that they were unpleasant or nonsensical, I really felt like I was not speaking the language, because the rest of the audience (made up of non-seniors, professors, and family members) seemed to laugh all at the same times, or to find the same moves or sequences meaningful in a way I did not. I was most impressed by a few pieces which were rather atypical of the performance as a whole; two were solo pieces and the other by a trio (that one was not set to music and was apparently originally choreographed by Twyla Tharp).
03. One sequence (in one of the pieces I couldn't substantially grasp) in which several dancers were encouraging someone else (who was clearly, at that moment, the audience's intended focal point) to do something...it got me thinking about visual and somatic ways to represent the theory of mind I've been developing for a long while, where "ego" is a position rather than a thing, and the various internal sub-personalities which constitute us (all of our discrete drives, memories, aversions, habits, etc. are fragments out of which each one of us is constructed) contest one another to occupy the lead position. I may go and talk to the Dance Department faculty and see if anyone has worked on using dance to communicate and explore ideas like that. I've seen someone use masks to make a similar (but not identical) point.
04. Something else that has been on my mind lately: the new Arthur film (about which I've heard consistently bad things). At some point when I was a kid I saw (at least large parts of) the original Arthur, starring Dudley Moore, but I was too young (or my viewing of it was too fragmented) for me to have anything more than a vague sense of the characters or plot. I noted weeks ago that it was available for streaming/viewing on Netflix, and so I watched it while working on other things (mostly grading). I remembered a few scenes with some vividness, but upon watching the film now I have discovered that I mis-remembered their sequence, significance and, in one case, the characters involved. The movie I partially mis-remembered was somewhat more complicated regarding character development (Arthur's fiancee, Susan, is more sympathetic and rounded in my imagined version). There is one scene where Arthur's prospective father-in-law, Burt, tells Arthur that, when Burt was 11, he killed a man who tried to steal food from Burt's family. For reasons I cannot imagine, in my inaccurate memory I thought that scene was an important point in establishing Burt as a character with perspective and sympathy who was encouraging Arthur's maturation (in my mis-memory the scene occurs late in the film). In fact, in the actual movie, Burt was threatening to kill Arthur if Arthur hurt Burt's daughter, and was infantilizing him in the process. I still prefer my mis-remembered version of that scene.
05. Over the past few weeks I've somehow drawn the attention of several of the faculty involved in Baskerville College's Center for Teaching and Learning, an in-house group focused on improving teaching skills for professors in order to make the classroom experience as productive as possible. I've been invited to participate in several their programs, once as a presenter, and have generally enjoyed it. I've also noticed that the same people (about a dozen professors) tend to come to the sessions, which someone else commented on as indicating that the people who care are already there, whereas folks who don't care about teaching as much aren't motivated to attend. This is troubling on any number of levels, but I suspect it's true.
06. I've been spending a lot of time the last several weekends going over rough drafts of essays by my Supernatural students. Their weekly essays started off strong but then began to decline in quality after about a month, and I began requiring rough drafts from those who were declining most precipitously. Literally, for the past three weekends, I've spent at least 8 hours a day going over rough drafts (sometimes multiple iterations of one essay) and working to instill in my students a better understanding of how and why to write some things and not others. I commented to Belisarius the other night that I'm trying to cram four years of Mt Pleasant's honors writing courses' content into a single college semester. I'm not a huge fan of repetition and enforced structure, but I do believe that they are necessary, even if only as a stage from which one eventually graduates, having internalized the important conceptual and practical tools they require you to learn. My students don't accidentally write good essays, and they often have not received anything like the basic training in writing that I did in high school. And, on the upside, it's working. The rough drafts are overall improving, several students require fewer of them to get to a good final draft, and they are clearly seeing the benefit of it in their grades, having done the extra but necessary work.
07. This year's vernal allergy season has been particularly awful, and I've been taking Benadryl (or the Target generic version, which is much less expensive) daily for almost a month now. I've actually woken up a few times from a sound sleep asphyxiating because the mucus membranes in my nose are swollen completely closed, which has never happened before that I can recall. I love spring time, and we seem to finally be moving into steadily warmer weather (yesterday was the only exception to this), but the allergies are hell.
08. Something that occurred two Fridays ago, and which I feel deserves some mention: I received an email from my exing-wife saying that her cat, Jasper, had died. He was 18 years old. I am not aware of the specific circumstances of his death (I assume he was euthanized), but I had known that his condition was deteriorating this past year. He and I lived together for roughly 3 years, and knew each other for a year before becoming housemates. He was a grumpy, gluttonous old bastard (Iunia and Euander, in particular, found him frightening and ogre-like), and I'm sad about his death. He loved my exing-wife ferociously, and she loved him; they were together for 18 years, longer than any other relationship she's had. Whenever she was traveling he would stop eating for the first couple days (and this cat loved food only slightly less than he loved her) until resignation kicked in and he took solace in eating. One of my great fears throughout my marriage was that he would die while she was away, and so I'm glad they were together when he died. I know he'll be missed.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Stil Restless, Still Dreaming
2011.04.13
Days Remaining: 405
01. It's been almost two months since I last posted to this blog, and that lacuna reflects a major change in my plans for the future: my contract at Baskerville College was very unexpectedly renewed due to the generosity and patronage of my Assistant Dean of Faculty, Department Chair, and various other professors all pulling together a funding package sufficient to support me for another year. What that did, however, was completely rewrite this blog's raison d'etre, as suddenly the countdown before leaving Connecticut was radically reset and expanded.
02. Although I was very grateful for the extension of my contract, all the more so because I had not been able to find a self-supporting job in Delaware, I ran aground, emotionally, on the fact that I'd be here in New England for another year. I have been drifting, a bit, in emotional and psychological terms, coming to grips with the implications of that, and of the impending deadline for my divorce, which weighs heavily on my mind the past few weeks especially. It has not been easy, and I got out of step with blogging. But I will now aim to restart the practice and be more communicative.
03. So, I'm still here, and still restless, and still dreaming like Endymion.
Days Remaining: 405
01. It's been almost two months since I last posted to this blog, and that lacuna reflects a major change in my plans for the future: my contract at Baskerville College was very unexpectedly renewed due to the generosity and patronage of my Assistant Dean of Faculty, Department Chair, and various other professors all pulling together a funding package sufficient to support me for another year. What that did, however, was completely rewrite this blog's raison d'etre, as suddenly the countdown before leaving Connecticut was radically reset and expanded.
02. Although I was very grateful for the extension of my contract, all the more so because I had not been able to find a self-supporting job in Delaware, I ran aground, emotionally, on the fact that I'd be here in New England for another year. I have been drifting, a bit, in emotional and psychological terms, coming to grips with the implications of that, and of the impending deadline for my divorce, which weighs heavily on my mind the past few weeks especially. It has not been easy, and I got out of step with blogging. But I will now aim to restart the practice and be more communicative.
03. So, I'm still here, and still restless, and still dreaming like Endymion.
Friday, February 25, 2011
WHOOPS
2010.02.25
01. Quick Correction: I said in my previous post that my cell phone number is up and running and referred to the 338 number, but that was my old number and is now G's. Not having used my cell since the end of November, my memory apparently reset to the status quo prior to July. My (fully operational) number is 401-225-8441. Sorry for any confusion.
01. Quick Correction: I said in my previous post that my cell phone number is up and running and referred to the 338 number, but that was my old number and is now G's. Not having used my cell since the end of November, my memory apparently reset to the status quo prior to July. My (fully operational) number is 401-225-8441. Sorry for any confusion.
Catching Up
2011.02.25
94 Days Remaining
00. Lots of things to talk about since my last post. I started to compose this in some sort of chronological order, but it didn't make the variety of topics any clearer, so I'm just going to present the content topically/thematically.
94 Days Remaining
00. Lots of things to talk about since my last post. I started to compose this in some sort of chronological order, but it didn't make the variety of topics any clearer, so I'm just going to present the content topically/thematically.
01. Accounts of Humanity
01.a. One of the academic or intellectual projects in which I am engaged on an ongoing basis is (very loosely) a theory of humanity, a kind of unified field theory of who and what we are. This is my version of the general humanist project initiated repeatedly in human history (with varying emphases and methods), although I am clearly operating within a specific tradition inaugurated in the European Renaissance (with roots in ancient eastern Mediterranean cultures), influenced by Indic and Chinese traditions, and permanently (since the 16th and 17th centuries) engaged with issues raised by the Scientific Method and epistemological skepticism. I am, methodologically, an eclectic who draws on sources from a range of academic disciplines (which I justify by arguing that all of our disciplines except the hardest of hard sciences - and I pick their brains too - are struggling with the same family of underlying questions such as "what are we?" "why are we here?" and "what should we do?").
01.b. I recently, while perusing the Baskerville College Bookshop between classes, found that another professor here is teaching a book entitled How We Get Along by J. David Velleman. This book argues that we can understand our activities more clearly using the metaphor of humans as improv actors engaged with other improv actors. To quote the book's description "He argues that we play ourselves - not artificially but authentically, by doing what would make sense coming from us as we really are. And, like improvisational actors, we deal with one another in dual capacities: both as characters within the social drama and as players contributing to the shared performance." That may sound obvious, but the implications he works out are very interesting, especially in terms of morality (what one can expect, how one ought to act - we have a sense of outside standards that we may or may not choose to manifest or to which we may conform, etc.).
01.c. The idea of improvisational performance working within a semi-constrained situationality was really intriguing to me because it dovetails nicely with an idea that I have found enormously productive for thinking about cultural activity (which, for humans, is any activity, but which differs from culture to culture), the idea of culture as repertoire developed by Anne Swidler (most fully in her book Talk Of Love), where culture (this is what my students refer to as the bucket theory) isn't a set of rules so much as a set of tools that we use to solve problems and negotiate situations. Velleman's idea, in conjunction with Swidler's, suggests that we could productively think of those tools as not being only instrumental (we do things with them) but also semi-constraining (if you use Tool X, then using Tool Y next would feel more logical than using Tool W or Z, let alone Tool Θ, even though technically you could use any of them).
01.d. I have only begun to think about how this works, but it's very exciting to me when I feel like I'm seeing a new angle on the way that humans are, or a new way to understand us.
02. Telephone
02.a. Last week I followed Iulia's advice and called Verizon to see if they had any recommendations about how to replace my cell phone with something inexpensive (since the contract is up in July and I'll be getting my own plan at that time instead of remaining on my exing-wife's). To my (largely comical, in retrospect, though it was annoying at the time) surprise, I discovered that my cell phone account is not with Verizon. The only reason I thought it was is that years ago, when I switched onto my exing-wife's account (from being a subsidiary line on Iulia's and Romulus' account - which was and is Verizon), my exing-wife and I talked about carriers and she indicated that it was the same for her and for my old line. Now, this is my memory, and a matter that was not of major importance, so it is entirely possible that I'm misremembering, or that she just slipped and misspoke, so no hard feelings on my part about it.
02.b. Once I knew the situation I called AT&T (the next-most common carrier) and found that they were the right carrier. And, thankfully (again, somewhat annoyingly given the issues since Thanksgiving with getting a replacement phone), their stores cell very inexpensive "Go-Phones." I bought one at the Christiana Mall AT&T store this past Sunday, and it works and I now once more have full cellular service (from my 338 number - please remember that I switched numbers when I separated from G this past summer). I will still probably make some use of the Gmail Phone function, as it is far more convenient to not have to physically hold the phone when sitting at my computer, but I will also now be able to make phone calls while traveling, etc.
03. Delaware Trip
03.a. I had a lovely time, spending most of it with Iunia & Euander at my sister's house, but also seeing my parents, Iulia & Romulus, and (on the trip back on Sunday) Barbatus, Caius & (very briefly before I left) Livia. Barbatus and others commented that I seemed "better," and I think that is entirely due to the positive benefits of spending time with people I love.
03.b. Among other things, I took the kids and my parents to the Delaware History Museum on Market Street in Wilmington (where works a woman for whom I used to babysit when her kids - now in their mid-20s - were Iunia and Euander's ages). The Museum was far larger than I expected (Momula tells me it is located in what was the original Woolworth's Department Store building), with very interesting stuff both on the trains and on the history of Delaware. Euander preferred running around and climbing on stuff, while Iunia was more interested in the content of several of the exhibits. One display featured life-sized papier-mache statues of colonial figures of importance (from New Sweden, through Dutch and eventually English rule under William Penn), and I explained to her that one side of our family is descended from the head of New Sweden, Governor Printz. There was also an exhibit about the Lenni Lenape, and I told Iunia that we are descended from Nanticokes on Momula's side of the family. I loved being able to share that with her, and near the time we were leaving she walked over and asked which one of them was our "great-great-great-great grandfather" again. I love feeling physically connected, over several generations and hundreds of years, to the place that, in my heart, is home. And I loved being able to tell Iunia about that connection. I was also very interested to see her struggling to think about the historical fact of slavery (something she, to her credit, finds appalling and very upsetting), as it was mentioned in several exhibits (though there was no mention of the extraordinary fact that, prior to adopting the US Constitution, some Delaware laws recognized property-owning women and free, property-owning blacks, as having the right to vote - which right was denied after adopting the Constitution, perversely).
03.c. We also went to Hibachi Steakhouse for dinner on Saturday (something Euander and I had been discussing since my arrival on Friday morning), and on Sunday we went ice skating at the Rust Arena at the University of Delaware. I haven't been ice skating in over a decade, though I used to go weekly when a student at UD, and I had a blast. Most of the time I skated hand-in-hand with Iunia, but I eventually (with Selena's help) convinced her to skate on her own (something she can do - but she's very nervous about falling, so she prefers to have someone help steady her). Euander, on the other hand, was very focused on going solo, and fell a lot but always got back up and kept at it. I was very impressed with both of their skill levels, especially because they've had no lessons and have been skating weekly only since the beginning of January.
03.d. Saturday night I spent a few hours with Iulia, Romulus, a grad student friend of theirs from Iulia's department at UD, and their dog, Libby. Romulus, who had the major ankle surgery in the Fall, has made an amazing advance in his recovery. He is now able to stand up on his own, and walk around with either a cane or a crutch (I'm emotionally and ethically obligated at this point, R, to remind you to use either of them when walking no matter how short the distance). The difference is astounding, and I cannot be happier about it (apparently he is right on track for the recovery process, so a lot of my shock is really just having missed the intermediate steps). Libby, the dog, was kind enough to come and sit with (and at one point sleep next to) me on the couch, which I always appreciate.
03.e. I also spent some time with Momula and Dadulus, though less than I would have liked (it was mostly while visiting with the rest of the family), and Momula made me chocolate chip cookies, of which I was able to preserve most for my trip back to Connecticut (apparently love for those cookies runs in the family).
03.f. On my way back north I stopped at Barbatus and Livia's house, and went to dinner with Barbatus and their son, Caius, before picking Livia up from her school (she was arriving back from a band trip to Spain), and then heading back onto the road. I actually left in a hurry, which I am sorry to have done, because I suddenly realized it was getting close to 7pm and I still had 2 hours of driving to do, and was feeling very tired. As it was, I made it back here by 11pm, and then went immediately to bed.
04. School Matters
04.a. We got formal approval to do Ghost Hunting on campus for my Supernatural class, and I was interviewed for it yesterday for the campus student paper. I have also had several former students come by or email to ask if they can sit in on the class meetings, which I've said is fine. This past week we talked about the ways that ghost stories give people in our society ways to express and work through anxieties or questions about embodiment, and next week we'll be looking at the ways that ghost stories provide a way of thinking and worrying about memory.
04.b. During both the interview and class yesterday I was asked (this happens periodically) if I believe in ghosts, and I explained in both cases that I am an agnostic on this question. I explain that I have personally had one extremely clear experience in which I perceived a being (with what seemed to me a definite sense of presence and agency) which I could not physically see but which I could physically delineate in space (i.e., I knew where it was and where it wasn't). I was one of two people who perceived it at the same time (the other was Iulia), and numerous other people had experiences of invisible presence and agency in that house (and even near that location). I am comfortable saying that my experience falls into the parameters of what is usually described in our society as "seeing a ghost" but with the caveat that i) those parameters are very broad and include a wide range of experiences, and ii) I make no claims (and could not, based on the actual content of my experience) about the nature - or even ontological independence - of what I perceived. It is entirely possible that I was completely mistaken or that I had a brain malfunction. On the other hand, I don't know why Iulia would have the same malfunction at the same time, but even if we didn't, a shared experience still does not mean that what we perceived was the "spirit" of a dead human being.
In fact, I believe, based upon examination of evidence, that the majority of alleged ghost encounters (both direct and indirect) can be debunked, and I think that they ought to be. On the other hand, I also know that there are a range of experiences which have thus far resisted successful (or persuasive to all) debunking, and I think that we overstep the scientific method if we simply assume that they are also debunkable without being able to demonstrate that they are. I neither affirm nor deny the existence of spirits, and neither do I make positive statements about the nature of what such spirits might be (dead humans, fairies, angels, demons, elementals, psychic energy signatures, etc. all having been proposed as possible identities). This is worth reiterating in my class because I take peoples' reports seriously as cultural products capable of being analyzed, which is not the same as affirming the ontological claims that such reports involve (e.g. that humans have immaterial souls which exist post-mortem in a disembodied but perceivable state). I am also interested in the ontological (do spirits really exist?) and taxonomic (if they exist, what are they?) claims, but this class is not really the best forum for reaching a final conclusion on those matters. I worry sometimes that people think that the class is an exercise in credulity, when in fact I want to sharpen my students analytical abilities and habits.
04.c. The Religious Studies department at Baskerville College has asked me to teach 2 courses next year, Christian Traditions and Jewish Traditions, both in the Spring semester. Classics has 1 course available, also for the Spring, but so far no other departments (Philosophy, Anthropology, and History) have anything available for me to teach. The Associate Dean of Faculty, who is my institutional (as opposed to departmental) boss, is trying to find some way to keep me here, but unless something changes very soon, it looks increasingly likely that this will be my final semester. I've continued to be asked by other faculty if I'm staying, and they have all been very positive and generous in their wishes that I could, which is professionally rewarding, at least.
05. Final Thoughts for This Post
05.a. I really enjoyed seeing everyone in Delaware last weekend. Euander remarked to Selena, as they were driving to the ice rink that, "When my favorite people get ready to leave, it makes me feel weird inside, like I'm sad." Kiddo, I know. You're one of my favorite people, too. Someday maybe you'll know how much it means to me that I'm one of yours.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
2011.02.16
103 Days Remaining
01. When I compose these posts I often find myself uncertain how to begin. I was talking with Belisarius yesterday on Gmail chat and thought about the fact that if one of us (via that medium) wants to talk with the other, they usually just send a message saying "Hey" (which is what I did yesterday). Beginnings are surprisingly difficult if you're either not comfortable (on any given day, or with life in general) or at all distracted. Actually, if you're distracted the problem is that beginnings are too easy, the more frivolous the endeavor or activity, the better. Also, as a serial procrastinator, I've often noticed that the actual procrastinating lies almost entirely in getting started: once work is underway, I have no trouble doing it.
02. Which is not to say that this blog is work, but I don't always feel like it's connecting with many people, and I often feel vaguely strange re-treading ideas and thoughts I've had on any given day (it feels either narcissistic or parochial). Does it really matter, for instance, that I am still dealing with the lingering infection from last week? That another professor and I were stood up for a presentation on Monday night by a student who couldn't get her schedule straight? That yesterday was bitterly cold when the wind blew, and the sun's light, though clear, was no match for it?
03. What do I think about, here all by myself for most of the day and night? Yesterday morning I woke up, completely and wide awake, at 313am (I could see the time on my alarm clock) and I spent the next three hours thinking. Thinking about everything from moment to moment. Ideas for stories, for essays, worries about everything from my back (which has been feeling strained lately) to Iunia growing up in our so very sexist society to the increasing variance between the wealthy and everyone else in our society, memories of a joke a student told, a passing thought about food, and so forth. All sort of swirled around in my head for hours and hours, and I never got back to sleep.
04. Random musical reference (not safe for work, though only in the latter third of the 10:16 song). This is Reggie Watts (a musician/comedian who is also the lead singer for the great soul-rock band Maktub; here's their song "You Can't Hide" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWgfl-E0v7g) and this song, "Thus Far," makes no sense (he does stream of consciousness performances, which shouldn't work but do) but is full of really funny lines: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0cp3eK9hI0 . There is one line, near the beginning, that is lovely to hear in sound terms: "want some treasure?/Here you go/at the end of the rainbow."
05. Despite yesterday's bitter cold, today was back into the 40s and sunny, and the temperature is supposed to stay warm (at least the upper 30s, and on one day into the 50s) for the next several days. I am starting to feel a strong desire for spring, as this particular winter hasn't been much fun (though I've had plenty of other winters where the weather is enjoyable - this year it's mostly been a pain - which probably more reflects my overall mood).
06. I'm going to Delaware on Friday morning, early (as in, leaving by 430am). Tonight I need to finish grading so my weekend is free, since I'll have to go to bed early tomorrow.
103 Days Remaining
01. When I compose these posts I often find myself uncertain how to begin. I was talking with Belisarius yesterday on Gmail chat and thought about the fact that if one of us (via that medium) wants to talk with the other, they usually just send a message saying "Hey" (which is what I did yesterday). Beginnings are surprisingly difficult if you're either not comfortable (on any given day, or with life in general) or at all distracted. Actually, if you're distracted the problem is that beginnings are too easy, the more frivolous the endeavor or activity, the better. Also, as a serial procrastinator, I've often noticed that the actual procrastinating lies almost entirely in getting started: once work is underway, I have no trouble doing it.
02. Which is not to say that this blog is work, but I don't always feel like it's connecting with many people, and I often feel vaguely strange re-treading ideas and thoughts I've had on any given day (it feels either narcissistic or parochial). Does it really matter, for instance, that I am still dealing with the lingering infection from last week? That another professor and I were stood up for a presentation on Monday night by a student who couldn't get her schedule straight? That yesterday was bitterly cold when the wind blew, and the sun's light, though clear, was no match for it?
03. What do I think about, here all by myself for most of the day and night? Yesterday morning I woke up, completely and wide awake, at 313am (I could see the time on my alarm clock) and I spent the next three hours thinking. Thinking about everything from moment to moment. Ideas for stories, for essays, worries about everything from my back (which has been feeling strained lately) to Iunia growing up in our so very sexist society to the increasing variance between the wealthy and everyone else in our society, memories of a joke a student told, a passing thought about food, and so forth. All sort of swirled around in my head for hours and hours, and I never got back to sleep.
04. Random musical reference (not safe for work, though only in the latter third of the 10:16 song). This is Reggie Watts (a musician/comedian who is also the lead singer for the great soul-rock band Maktub; here's their song "You Can't Hide" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWgfl-E0v7g) and this song, "Thus Far," makes no sense (he does stream of consciousness performances, which shouldn't work but do) but is full of really funny lines: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0cp3eK9hI0 . There is one line, near the beginning, that is lovely to hear in sound terms: "want some treasure?/Here you go/at the end of the rainbow."
05. Despite yesterday's bitter cold, today was back into the 40s and sunny, and the temperature is supposed to stay warm (at least the upper 30s, and on one day into the 50s) for the next several days. I am starting to feel a strong desire for spring, as this particular winter hasn't been much fun (though I've had plenty of other winters where the weather is enjoyable - this year it's mostly been a pain - which probably more reflects my overall mood).
06. I'm going to Delaware on Friday morning, early (as in, leaving by 430am). Tonight I need to finish grading so my weekend is free, since I'll have to go to bed early tomorrow.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
2011.02.10
109 Days Remaining
01. Well, I'm sick. In fact, roughly 2/3 of all the professors I know are sick right now. We all seem to have some version of a cold or sinus infection that includes stuffy headaches, runny noses, phlegmy coughs, and randomly occurring body aches (mine seem to be localized in the upper halves of my legs). Since none of this is debilitating, and we certainly all got it from the walking germ factories who are our students, most professors have continued teaching in person, but yesterday on campus we were not a happy bunch.
02. That said, teaching this week was very long, but overall went very well. I got to campus early on Tuesday, had good classes (we discussed causation and necessity in Medieval Philosophy, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the film, not the TV series) in Supernatural in American Popular Culture. In between classes I went to lunch with the Religious Studies' department's Islamic Studies professor, and after classes were done I attended a talk sponsored by the Philosophy Department. The talk was on what it means to claim that categories like race, gender, and disabled are socially constructed. After the talk, I accompanied the other Philosophy professors and the speaker to dinner, where we stayed from roughly 6 to 930pm discussing various issues. After that, I accompanied the speaker and two other professors to a bar in New Aldwych, where we waited until her train to Boston was ready to leave, and while there discussed television viewing habits and memories. While riding back to campus to get my car, I discussed issues about belief in ghosts and supernatural explanations with the philosophy professor with whom I am sharing an office this semester. After I got home, I stayed up to go through my ridiculously full inbox, and I got to bed around 1am. All in all, a full but satisfying day.
03.Yesterday morning/afternoon I played my newest Netflix disc-by-mail, which turned out to be a very odd film. It's Hawk the Slayer, a live-action fantasy from 1980 with clear Star Wars inspiration (with some Tolkien flavoring). It was, alas, in some ways very silly (Jack Palance is a weird Darth Vader-esque villain, for instance), but had elements that were interesting and which, in a different treatment, would have been very interesting. As with so many fantasy films or novels, it rested too much on special effects or archaic language to bolster a poorly developed plot and incoherent background story. But, that said, it's the kind of thing that could be revised (extensively) to generate a much better story.
04. Today is mostly cold. I didn't go outside at all yesterday, and so I read about the sub-freezing temperatures, but today I had to go back to campus, and it was so cold out that being outside between classes actually hurt any exposed skin. Tonight we're likely to go sub-zero with wind chill, and then things start to move upwards again with highs in the low 40s starting on Saturday (I can hardly wait). On the upside, today was very bright and sunny.
05. Livia has some exciting news: one of her short stories was accepted for publication at an online literary magazine. She's very excited, and I'm very happy for her, as it's about time people start recognizing her talent as an author.
06. She also mentioned in an email that she has begun to watch hockey (as a substitute for football). I have never been a sports fan of any sort, and the only sport I enjoyed participating in enough (or which I had enough skill in to participate seriously) was running, which isn't really for watching. Still, I have a theoretical appreciation for some sports (not football, which I genially loathe), including hockey, and so at her mention of this I looked up (on Wikipedia) the history of hockey, and discovered that it, like many of our sports, is a particularly modern version of a family of folk games played in Europe and North America into the 19th century. To my surprise, there are a host of other such modern versions (mostly local) in other countries, including Bandy (in Ireland and Scandinavia), Shinty (in Scotland), and Hurling (Canada). There is also speculation that hockey is related to a now defunct Dutch game called Kolf which is also the ancestor of our modern golf (obviously with substantial modifications, such as the loss of an opposing team - which would be awesome). Lacrosse, interestingly, is a Native American game and so is related only in a hybrid fashion - there is some speculation that hockey's interpersonal violence is actually derived from lacrosse playing styles (although I'm suspicious that this may be a way to suggest that Native Americans were more savage than Europeans and I don't know the evidence for this claim so I can't endorse it). Actual Lacrosse nowadays is, interestingly, generally less violent than Hockey.
07. I bought a new inflatable bed. My first one developed a tear around the gasket into which the pump is inserted to inflate the bed, and although I've gone for two or three months now sleeping on what is basically a mattress pad, the muscle aches with this cold were sufficient that I thought, on Monday, that I really wanted to sleep on something softer than the floor (even padded). It helps a lot.
08. Selena has been posting a bunch recently about Iunia and Euander, who remain lights in my days. I won't summarize her blog here, but if you're interested in the kids' exploits of late (Euander had a very funny episode a few nights ago - which, when I shared it with my students, made him favorite kid for the day among them), check her out: www.yestheykeepmebusy.blogspot.com .
09. I'll be going to Delaware next weekend (after Valentine's Day). If any of you will be around and free, let me know!
109 Days Remaining
01. Well, I'm sick. In fact, roughly 2/3 of all the professors I know are sick right now. We all seem to have some version of a cold or sinus infection that includes stuffy headaches, runny noses, phlegmy coughs, and randomly occurring body aches (mine seem to be localized in the upper halves of my legs). Since none of this is debilitating, and we certainly all got it from the walking germ factories who are our students, most professors have continued teaching in person, but yesterday on campus we were not a happy bunch.
02. That said, teaching this week was very long, but overall went very well. I got to campus early on Tuesday, had good classes (we discussed causation and necessity in Medieval Philosophy, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the film, not the TV series) in Supernatural in American Popular Culture. In between classes I went to lunch with the Religious Studies' department's Islamic Studies professor, and after classes were done I attended a talk sponsored by the Philosophy Department. The talk was on what it means to claim that categories like race, gender, and disabled are socially constructed. After the talk, I accompanied the other Philosophy professors and the speaker to dinner, where we stayed from roughly 6 to 930pm discussing various issues. After that, I accompanied the speaker and two other professors to a bar in New Aldwych, where we waited until her train to Boston was ready to leave, and while there discussed television viewing habits and memories. While riding back to campus to get my car, I discussed issues about belief in ghosts and supernatural explanations with the philosophy professor with whom I am sharing an office this semester. After I got home, I stayed up to go through my ridiculously full inbox, and I got to bed around 1am. All in all, a full but satisfying day.
03.Yesterday morning/afternoon I played my newest Netflix disc-by-mail, which turned out to be a very odd film. It's Hawk the Slayer, a live-action fantasy from 1980 with clear Star Wars inspiration (with some Tolkien flavoring). It was, alas, in some ways very silly (Jack Palance is a weird Darth Vader-esque villain, for instance), but had elements that were interesting and which, in a different treatment, would have been very interesting. As with so many fantasy films or novels, it rested too much on special effects or archaic language to bolster a poorly developed plot and incoherent background story. But, that said, it's the kind of thing that could be revised (extensively) to generate a much better story.
04. Today is mostly cold. I didn't go outside at all yesterday, and so I read about the sub-freezing temperatures, but today I had to go back to campus, and it was so cold out that being outside between classes actually hurt any exposed skin. Tonight we're likely to go sub-zero with wind chill, and then things start to move upwards again with highs in the low 40s starting on Saturday (I can hardly wait). On the upside, today was very bright and sunny.
05. Livia has some exciting news: one of her short stories was accepted for publication at an online literary magazine. She's very excited, and I'm very happy for her, as it's about time people start recognizing her talent as an author.
06. She also mentioned in an email that she has begun to watch hockey (as a substitute for football). I have never been a sports fan of any sort, and the only sport I enjoyed participating in enough (or which I had enough skill in to participate seriously) was running, which isn't really for watching. Still, I have a theoretical appreciation for some sports (not football, which I genially loathe), including hockey, and so at her mention of this I looked up (on Wikipedia) the history of hockey, and discovered that it, like many of our sports, is a particularly modern version of a family of folk games played in Europe and North America into the 19th century. To my surprise, there are a host of other such modern versions (mostly local) in other countries, including Bandy (in Ireland and Scandinavia), Shinty (in Scotland), and Hurling (Canada). There is also speculation that hockey is related to a now defunct Dutch game called Kolf which is also the ancestor of our modern golf (obviously with substantial modifications, such as the loss of an opposing team - which would be awesome). Lacrosse, interestingly, is a Native American game and so is related only in a hybrid fashion - there is some speculation that hockey's interpersonal violence is actually derived from lacrosse playing styles (although I'm suspicious that this may be a way to suggest that Native Americans were more savage than Europeans and I don't know the evidence for this claim so I can't endorse it). Actual Lacrosse nowadays is, interestingly, generally less violent than Hockey.
07. I bought a new inflatable bed. My first one developed a tear around the gasket into which the pump is inserted to inflate the bed, and although I've gone for two or three months now sleeping on what is basically a mattress pad, the muscle aches with this cold were sufficient that I thought, on Monday, that I really wanted to sleep on something softer than the floor (even padded). It helps a lot.
08. Selena has been posting a bunch recently about Iunia and Euander, who remain lights in my days. I won't summarize her blog here, but if you're interested in the kids' exploits of late (Euander had a very funny episode a few nights ago - which, when I shared it with my students, made him favorite kid for the day among them), check her out: www.yestheykeepmebusy.blogspot.com .
09. I'll be going to Delaware next weekend (after Valentine's Day). If any of you will be around and free, let me know!
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Sunday Sunday
2011.02.06
113 Days Remaining
01. First, a correction. If you look at the preceding post, you'll note that I made a calender mistake: my brother Decius' birthday was 01 February, not 02 February. I wrote "today" for "yesterday," which is why it gets confusing when I used the past tense when talking about his birthday despite suggesting that I was writing in the afternoon of his birthday. I think this was due to the deleted posts snafu, but anyway, the wishes were belated when I posted them. So, Decius, I hope you had a good birthday on February 1st. And, generally, a nice day on the 2nd, for good measure.
02. Today, of course, is Superbowl Day, and as per my usual mode of celebrating, I don't particularly care, except that there definitely won't be a new Simpsons or Family Guy to watch tomorrow on Hulu.com. I was invited to participate in a pool-playing tournament with another professor, but I don't actually like hanging out with said professor (I knew her before I worked here, and she's very disturbed, though a nice woman). So instead I'm here working. Or, pretending to, anyway.
03. Last night I went onto campus and did a bunch of photocopying and file-sorting so as to be a less presumptuous office user (as a Visiting Faculty member I don't have my own office, and am sharing an office with someone who is in residence but on sabbatical, so he's not usually in on the days I teach). I was in my building for somewhere around 5 hours, working and monkeying about. In the final hour and a half, however, I repeatedly had the feeling that I was Not Alone. I've heard stories (one, exactly) that this building has had at least one ghost sighting, but I've worked late several times (including one all-nighter two years ago when I wanted to get a lot of grading finished up) and have never had anything odd occur. Last night I heard a door slam when I was the only person in the building, and I had the impression (at least once definitely triggered by visual stimuli - if the other times were also so triggered I was not consciously aware of it) that there was someone else walking around in the area of the foyer where the copy machine is located on the 3rd floor. This was both intriguing but also a bit disorienting, and at one point I actually sort of looked around to see if a student had gotten into the building. When I left I ran into a Campus Safety officer and actually told him that they might want to sweep the building to make sure there wasn't someone who had sneaked in.
04. As I'm working this evening I've been playing a documentary (via Netflix) about wolverines. The voice-overs are somewhat annoyingly "awed and cheerful" (ex: "Dr. X has written over 100 scientific articles" and the narrator clearly wants to have Dr. X's baby). I mention that only to get it out of the way; the visual footage is astonishing, and various researchers who are studying wolverines are alternatively charming, bittersweet, or adorable in their enthusiasm (one group, working in Glacier National Park, continued to do their work for years after funding ran out because they loved it). I'm particularly struck by how differently wolverines behave when studied at length than the way that people had previously assumed. Among the neat discoveries: wolverine males have multiple mates at one time, each of whom will have her own litter and den; unexpectedly, the fathers travel from den to den while there are pups and help raise each litter, and when the pups are old enough to travel, the different litters will sometimes travel together around the territory with their father, learning wilderness skills. Also, wolverines are so well insulated by their fur that they don't melt snow when they lay down on it. They're very neat animals, to my mind especially as examples of evolutionary change: wolverines are descended from weasels, but have clearly begun evolving into a different niche, and their bodies are shaped much more like canines and bears than like weasels now.
05. Tomorrow night my Supernatural in American Popular Culture is having our first movie watching, to see the film Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which I prefer over the television series). I'm looking forward to it, as it'll be my first chance to see the students interacting directly with the material (as opposed to reading it outside of class and then having a chance to think about it before class). Also, from past experience, out-of-class movie watching is a good way to generate (or encourage) group building.
06. And that's about it for now. Decius, I'm sorry for screwing up your birthday wish.
113 Days Remaining
01. First, a correction. If you look at the preceding post, you'll note that I made a calender mistake: my brother Decius' birthday was 01 February, not 02 February. I wrote "today" for "yesterday," which is why it gets confusing when I used the past tense when talking about his birthday despite suggesting that I was writing in the afternoon of his birthday. I think this was due to the deleted posts snafu, but anyway, the wishes were belated when I posted them. So, Decius, I hope you had a good birthday on February 1st. And, generally, a nice day on the 2nd, for good measure.
02. Today, of course, is Superbowl Day, and as per my usual mode of celebrating, I don't particularly care, except that there definitely won't be a new Simpsons or Family Guy to watch tomorrow on Hulu.com. I was invited to participate in a pool-playing tournament with another professor, but I don't actually like hanging out with said professor (I knew her before I worked here, and she's very disturbed, though a nice woman). So instead I'm here working. Or, pretending to, anyway.
03. Last night I went onto campus and did a bunch of photocopying and file-sorting so as to be a less presumptuous office user (as a Visiting Faculty member I don't have my own office, and am sharing an office with someone who is in residence but on sabbatical, so he's not usually in on the days I teach). I was in my building for somewhere around 5 hours, working and monkeying about. In the final hour and a half, however, I repeatedly had the feeling that I was Not Alone. I've heard stories (one, exactly) that this building has had at least one ghost sighting, but I've worked late several times (including one all-nighter two years ago when I wanted to get a lot of grading finished up) and have never had anything odd occur. Last night I heard a door slam when I was the only person in the building, and I had the impression (at least once definitely triggered by visual stimuli - if the other times were also so triggered I was not consciously aware of it) that there was someone else walking around in the area of the foyer where the copy machine is located on the 3rd floor. This was both intriguing but also a bit disorienting, and at one point I actually sort of looked around to see if a student had gotten into the building. When I left I ran into a Campus Safety officer and actually told him that they might want to sweep the building to make sure there wasn't someone who had sneaked in.
04. As I'm working this evening I've been playing a documentary (via Netflix) about wolverines. The voice-overs are somewhat annoyingly "awed and cheerful" (ex: "Dr. X has written over 100 scientific articles" and the narrator clearly wants to have Dr. X's baby). I mention that only to get it out of the way; the visual footage is astonishing, and various researchers who are studying wolverines are alternatively charming, bittersweet, or adorable in their enthusiasm (one group, working in Glacier National Park, continued to do their work for years after funding ran out because they loved it). I'm particularly struck by how differently wolverines behave when studied at length than the way that people had previously assumed. Among the neat discoveries: wolverine males have multiple mates at one time, each of whom will have her own litter and den; unexpectedly, the fathers travel from den to den while there are pups and help raise each litter, and when the pups are old enough to travel, the different litters will sometimes travel together around the territory with their father, learning wilderness skills. Also, wolverines are so well insulated by their fur that they don't melt snow when they lay down on it. They're very neat animals, to my mind especially as examples of evolutionary change: wolverines are descended from weasels, but have clearly begun evolving into a different niche, and their bodies are shaped much more like canines and bears than like weasels now.
05. Tomorrow night my Supernatural in American Popular Culture is having our first movie watching, to see the film Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which I prefer over the television series). I'm looking forward to it, as it'll be my first chance to see the students interacting directly with the material (as opposed to reading it outside of class and then having a chance to think about it before class). Also, from past experience, out-of-class movie watching is a good way to generate (or encourage) group building.
06. And that's about it for now. Decius, I'm sorry for screwing up your birthday wish.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Cailleach and Groundhog Agree: Winter Is Ending Sooner Rather Than Later
2011.02.02 Imbolc/Candlemas
117 Days Remaining
01. First off, happy birthday to my brother, Decius, who turned 29 today. I hope he and his wife had a chance to celebrate, given the weather conditions now regnant.
02. Second, I'm annoyed. I realized that I had three or four drafts the contents of which were never actually posted, and I went through, copied and pasted them all into this post, and then promptly deleted them unintentionally. Nothing was particularly pressing or so lyrical that its loss is cause for weeping, but it was a substantial amount of text and musings, and now all is gone. Damn it. I'm trying to remember what fragments were contained therein, but I only browsed it as I was collecting them, and nothing is sticking out to me to reconstruct.
03. Baskerville College was closed today (which impacted me not at all, as I don't teach on Wednesdays) in preparation for the monumental blizzard that smote a large portion of the country. New Aldwych, however, got icy sleet in the early morning, followed by temperatures in the mid- to upper-40s and rain for the rest of the day. I hear that driving conditions, due to the early morning sleet, were hazardous, but I went out to shovel further (with the higher temperatures and rain making some of the more entrenched snow drifts amenable to being moved) and had very little difficulty. Momula told me that conditions in Wilmington were similar to those here. My exing-wife sent me a photo of Herman, the best dog in the world, playing in the snow that fell at their house in Tulsa, OK:
He really likes the snow, so I'm happy that he finally got some to play in.
04. Weather is important today, it being of course Groundhog Day, and overcast. This means, of course, a shorter winter, if one believes in the prognosticatory capabilities of largish ground-dwelling rodents (especially in western PA). Interestingly, it isn't only German groundhog-watchers who think that today's weather is oracular: in Ireland and parts of (Gaelic-speaking) Scotland (which are Gaelic speaking because they were settled/conquered by Irish pirates called the Scotti in the Dark Ages) today is Imbolc, and today is the day that the Cailleach (literally: "old woman" - she's kind of a semi-divine legendary figure) goes out to gather firewood for the remainder of the winter. According to traditional lore, if it's going to be a long winter she makes the sun shine on Imbolc to allow her to see farther, so if it's cloudy she isn't worried about winter going on much longer. So, as far as I'm concerned, that pretty much settles it: a legendary Irish hag and a Pennsylvanian rodent agree that winter is due to end sooner rather than later this year. And there is much rejoicing, I'm sure, as many people with whom I've communicated recently have said that this winter in particular is weighing on them.
05. Speaking of weather, and on a much sadder note, today I read a striking article about a polar bear who swam for nine days trying to find an ice floe on which to climb and rest (she was being tracked via radio implant). She lost 100 pounds in the process, and tragically the cub who accompanied her died en route. In related news, the Republican governor of Alaska is trying to gain access to various restricted wildlife areas in order to allow for more oil drilling.
06. To balance out that story, here is a very charming song and video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeZMTOSeHVw&feature=branded . It's called "Be My Honeypie" and is by the Weepies (who, despite their lacrimose name are not depressing).
07. In the midst of other things the past few days I've been doing some fun academic reading, and came across a very interesting essay by Richard C. Miller entitled "Mark's Empty Tomb and Other Translation Fables In Classical Antiquity." Basically, he's addressing an interesting manuscript problem: in the earliest manuscripts (and in attestations by early readers) the Gospel According to Mark ends with the discovery of Jesus' empty tomb, and the women fleeing in fear (for anyone keeping track, that means that Mark 16.8 is the likely original ending, and that Mark 16.9-20 are later additions). Though the young man they meet in the tomb tells them that they will see Jesus in Galilee, if Mark ends at verse 8, there is no narrated encounter with Jesus after his burial. Now, this is a problem, because it leaves open the possibility that the author (and the community for/to whom he was writing) of Mark didn't intend that Jesus was physically resurrected, or (even worse) that he didn't know that story, or any range of possibilities. Biblical scholars, often working from faith positions, have tended to interpret the resurrection narratives in light of 2nd Temple Judaic resurrection beliefs, and to insist that Jesus is best understood either as sui generis (i.e., totally new) or best understood in terms of Jewish prophecy, etc. Miller says, essentially, this is bollocks. There are plenty of similar stories (even down to empty tombs and the announcement that those looking for the disappeared deceased would see them elsewhere) both earlier than, contemporaneous with, and later than Mark, but they're all Greek or Latin and about demi-gods, heroes, or related folks. This is not exactly news to me, but Miller's essay lists a lot of them, more than I had been aware of, and statistically makes it much more difficult to claim that the original Mark was only coincidentally like those other stories. This comports with something that I have been convinced of for a while, following the work of Graham Burridge, that the Gospels really make sense primarily in terms of Hellenic literary traditions (specifically biographies) rather than in Judaic literary traditions. This is sensible, given that 1st and 2nd century Palestine, Egypt, and Anatolia (modern Turkey) had large Judean populations, were Hellenophonic (Greek speaking), and that educated Judeans were educated in Greek. But it does also strongly point out that the expectations and interpretations of Mark's original audience were profoundly shaped by Greek (and Roman) culture, thus distancing them from a solely rural Palestinian cultural background (which some people try to assert in order to keep Christianity pure and far away from "pagan" traditions). Miller goes so far as to argue that, taken to its logical conclusion, his argument suggests that Mark was written for non-Judeans (i.e., "Gentile" Christians). I'm less confident about that conclusion, mostly because we know so little about the ethnic backgrounds of early followers of Jesus (both during and after his lifetime), and what we do know strongly suggests a majority Judean group. If Mark was written for non-Judean Christians, it became popular with Judean Christians very quickly. Anyway, Miller's essay is a good one, and though I'm not teaching New Testament this semester, this is the sort of stuff that I use to make these texts less familiar to my students, who often come to the class already "knowing" lots of stuff about what the New Testament is and contains.
08. Anyway, on another topic entirely, Junia has been diagnosed with Scarlet Fever, something that in earlier times would have been cause for serious alarm (Helen Keller, for instance, may have become deaf and blind due to contracting Scarlet Fever, although the diagnosis is disputed - some medical historians think she had a form of meningitis). Regardless, in this era of antibiotics, Junia is already back at school and, according to Selena and Momula, was never even in poor spirits, let alone bedridden. Still, she has scarlet fever, so I say, "Get well soon, kiddo!"
09. In my Medieval Philosophy course we're doing historical and cultural background/context work to figure out why medieval European philosophy is both like and unlike modern Western philosophy, and why it tends to get short shrift nowadays (at least outside of academic areas like Philosophy of Religion, where Thomas Aquinas is still read frequently). Yesterday we read the autobiographical text Historia Calamitatum ("history of my sufferings") by Peter Abelard, my favorite medieval philosopher, who was the Elvis of medieval European philosophy, though less gracious in person than the King is said to have been. Abelard was, according to himself and most of his contemporaries, the smartest man in Europe. He had a tendency to go to study with someone and, after a ridiculously short time, begin to publicly surpass his teacher, and then to challenge them to public disputes/debates. Unfortunately, he pretty much always won the debates, except where no one could understand what he was talking about. He is also famous for being the Abelard of "Abelard and Heloise" (one of the most famous couples in European history - before Romeo and Juliet they were the preeminent example of romantic love in the Western tradition). Given his intellectual achievements, the most astonishing part of their story is that Heloise (his student, lover, and eventual secret wife) was apparently his match. Reading their letters (those that have survived, anyway) is profoundly unsettling, because he's an egomaniacal genius who, incidentally, spends as much of his time with Heloise as is humanly possible and she is incredibly smart but says, basically, "I'd give it all up for you." We read their story in my Love, Death and Desire course last semester, and the students could not agree on whether Heloise was Abelard's doormat, equal, emotional and moral superior, or some complicated mixture of all three. Even though he was an arrogant jerk, I like the fact that in their later life (they became a monk and a nun, respectively, after Abelard was castrated - you read that right - by Heloise's uncle, who was furious about the secret marriage) Abelard basically neglected all of his official duties to visit Heloise's convent, even though by that time physical passion was kind of a no-go. Their relationship was certainly not ideal, but I've never been able to shake the strong sense that they were actively devoted to one another, and wanted to be nowhere else than together. On the down side, they named their son Astrolabe, after the astronomical device.
10. And that's about it.
117 Days Remaining
01. First off, happy birthday to my brother, Decius, who turned 29 today. I hope he and his wife had a chance to celebrate, given the weather conditions now regnant.
02. Second, I'm annoyed. I realized that I had three or four drafts the contents of which were never actually posted, and I went through, copied and pasted them all into this post, and then promptly deleted them unintentionally. Nothing was particularly pressing or so lyrical that its loss is cause for weeping, but it was a substantial amount of text and musings, and now all is gone. Damn it. I'm trying to remember what fragments were contained therein, but I only browsed it as I was collecting them, and nothing is sticking out to me to reconstruct.
03. Baskerville College was closed today (which impacted me not at all, as I don't teach on Wednesdays) in preparation for the monumental blizzard that smote a large portion of the country. New Aldwych, however, got icy sleet in the early morning, followed by temperatures in the mid- to upper-40s and rain for the rest of the day. I hear that driving conditions, due to the early morning sleet, were hazardous, but I went out to shovel further (with the higher temperatures and rain making some of the more entrenched snow drifts amenable to being moved) and had very little difficulty. Momula told me that conditions in Wilmington were similar to those here. My exing-wife sent me a photo of Herman, the best dog in the world, playing in the snow that fell at their house in Tulsa, OK:
He really likes the snow, so I'm happy that he finally got some to play in.04. Weather is important today, it being of course Groundhog Day, and overcast. This means, of course, a shorter winter, if one believes in the prognosticatory capabilities of largish ground-dwelling rodents (especially in western PA). Interestingly, it isn't only German groundhog-watchers who think that today's weather is oracular: in Ireland and parts of (Gaelic-speaking) Scotland (which are Gaelic speaking because they were settled/conquered by Irish pirates called the Scotti in the Dark Ages) today is Imbolc, and today is the day that the Cailleach (literally: "old woman" - she's kind of a semi-divine legendary figure) goes out to gather firewood for the remainder of the winter. According to traditional lore, if it's going to be a long winter she makes the sun shine on Imbolc to allow her to see farther, so if it's cloudy she isn't worried about winter going on much longer. So, as far as I'm concerned, that pretty much settles it: a legendary Irish hag and a Pennsylvanian rodent agree that winter is due to end sooner rather than later this year. And there is much rejoicing, I'm sure, as many people with whom I've communicated recently have said that this winter in particular is weighing on them.
05. Speaking of weather, and on a much sadder note, today I read a striking article about a polar bear who swam for nine days trying to find an ice floe on which to climb and rest (she was being tracked via radio implant). She lost 100 pounds in the process, and tragically the cub who accompanied her died en route. In related news, the Republican governor of Alaska is trying to gain access to various restricted wildlife areas in order to allow for more oil drilling.
06. To balance out that story, here is a very charming song and video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeZMTOSeHVw&feature=branded . It's called "Be My Honeypie" and is by the Weepies (who, despite their lacrimose name are not depressing).
07. In the midst of other things the past few days I've been doing some fun academic reading, and came across a very interesting essay by Richard C. Miller entitled "Mark's Empty Tomb and Other Translation Fables In Classical Antiquity." Basically, he's addressing an interesting manuscript problem: in the earliest manuscripts (and in attestations by early readers) the Gospel According to Mark ends with the discovery of Jesus' empty tomb, and the women fleeing in fear (for anyone keeping track, that means that Mark 16.8 is the likely original ending, and that Mark 16.9-20 are later additions). Though the young man they meet in the tomb tells them that they will see Jesus in Galilee, if Mark ends at verse 8, there is no narrated encounter with Jesus after his burial. Now, this is a problem, because it leaves open the possibility that the author (and the community for/to whom he was writing) of Mark didn't intend that Jesus was physically resurrected, or (even worse) that he didn't know that story, or any range of possibilities. Biblical scholars, often working from faith positions, have tended to interpret the resurrection narratives in light of 2nd Temple Judaic resurrection beliefs, and to insist that Jesus is best understood either as sui generis (i.e., totally new) or best understood in terms of Jewish prophecy, etc. Miller says, essentially, this is bollocks. There are plenty of similar stories (even down to empty tombs and the announcement that those looking for the disappeared deceased would see them elsewhere) both earlier than, contemporaneous with, and later than Mark, but they're all Greek or Latin and about demi-gods, heroes, or related folks. This is not exactly news to me, but Miller's essay lists a lot of them, more than I had been aware of, and statistically makes it much more difficult to claim that the original Mark was only coincidentally like those other stories. This comports with something that I have been convinced of for a while, following the work of Graham Burridge, that the Gospels really make sense primarily in terms of Hellenic literary traditions (specifically biographies) rather than in Judaic literary traditions. This is sensible, given that 1st and 2nd century Palestine, Egypt, and Anatolia (modern Turkey) had large Judean populations, were Hellenophonic (Greek speaking), and that educated Judeans were educated in Greek. But it does also strongly point out that the expectations and interpretations of Mark's original audience were profoundly shaped by Greek (and Roman) culture, thus distancing them from a solely rural Palestinian cultural background (which some people try to assert in order to keep Christianity pure and far away from "pagan" traditions). Miller goes so far as to argue that, taken to its logical conclusion, his argument suggests that Mark was written for non-Judeans (i.e., "Gentile" Christians). I'm less confident about that conclusion, mostly because we know so little about the ethnic backgrounds of early followers of Jesus (both during and after his lifetime), and what we do know strongly suggests a majority Judean group. If Mark was written for non-Judean Christians, it became popular with Judean Christians very quickly. Anyway, Miller's essay is a good one, and though I'm not teaching New Testament this semester, this is the sort of stuff that I use to make these texts less familiar to my students, who often come to the class already "knowing" lots of stuff about what the New Testament is and contains.
08. Anyway, on another topic entirely, Junia has been diagnosed with Scarlet Fever, something that in earlier times would have been cause for serious alarm (Helen Keller, for instance, may have become deaf and blind due to contracting Scarlet Fever, although the diagnosis is disputed - some medical historians think she had a form of meningitis). Regardless, in this era of antibiotics, Junia is already back at school and, according to Selena and Momula, was never even in poor spirits, let alone bedridden. Still, she has scarlet fever, so I say, "Get well soon, kiddo!"
09. In my Medieval Philosophy course we're doing historical and cultural background/context work to figure out why medieval European philosophy is both like and unlike modern Western philosophy, and why it tends to get short shrift nowadays (at least outside of academic areas like Philosophy of Religion, where Thomas Aquinas is still read frequently). Yesterday we read the autobiographical text Historia Calamitatum ("history of my sufferings") by Peter Abelard, my favorite medieval philosopher, who was the Elvis of medieval European philosophy, though less gracious in person than the King is said to have been. Abelard was, according to himself and most of his contemporaries, the smartest man in Europe. He had a tendency to go to study with someone and, after a ridiculously short time, begin to publicly surpass his teacher, and then to challenge them to public disputes/debates. Unfortunately, he pretty much always won the debates, except where no one could understand what he was talking about. He is also famous for being the Abelard of "Abelard and Heloise" (one of the most famous couples in European history - before Romeo and Juliet they were the preeminent example of romantic love in the Western tradition). Given his intellectual achievements, the most astonishing part of their story is that Heloise (his student, lover, and eventual secret wife) was apparently his match. Reading their letters (those that have survived, anyway) is profoundly unsettling, because he's an egomaniacal genius who, incidentally, spends as much of his time with Heloise as is humanly possible and she is incredibly smart but says, basically, "I'd give it all up for you." We read their story in my Love, Death and Desire course last semester, and the students could not agree on whether Heloise was Abelard's doormat, equal, emotional and moral superior, or some complicated mixture of all three. Even though he was an arrogant jerk, I like the fact that in their later life (they became a monk and a nun, respectively, after Abelard was castrated - you read that right - by Heloise's uncle, who was furious about the secret marriage) Abelard basically neglected all of his official duties to visit Heloise's convent, even though by that time physical passion was kind of a no-go. Their relationship was certainly not ideal, but I've never been able to shake the strong sense that they were actively devoted to one another, and wanted to be nowhere else than together. On the down side, they named their son Astrolabe, after the astronomical device.
10. And that's about it.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
2011.01.29
121 Days Remaining
01. I started composing this post two days ago on Thursday, where I was writing from home, where I would normally not be at this time on a Thursday, because Baskerville College was closed due to snow. We didn't get hammered quite so hard as points south (apparently Wilmington got about a foot, we seem to be somewhere between 8 and 10 inches at the most), but New Aldwych isn't good with handling snow, and neither is Baskerville's campus, and so we were closed. On the 4th day of the semester. Several students wrote to ask me about how this impacted the class topics for Thursday (are we skipping them, pushing them back to Tuesday next week, or adding them to Tuesday's scheduled class - it's the third option, btw). I went out for a walk yesterday and the accumulated snow from the past few storms is hovering around 2 feet on the ground (and that's after having had intermittent warm days and upper-layer melting). The roads are mostly plowed, although none so well as I would like, and I once again shoveled my car out from a mound of snow (this time on the street, rather than attempting to shovel in-between cars in a parking lot).
02. Though I'm not normally the type to pass around items of utter cuteness, I saw this today and thought it was adorable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBU3BwWpR8Q&feature=player_embedded . It starts off slow, but once the pony starts, it's very cute.
03. Today I've been doing some research and working on various things. It occurred to me that I wish I had a larger and more diversified living space just so I had housework to do, if that makes sense. As it is, here, I get up, have breakfast, and have my computer to work with. I was actually kind of glad to do the snow shoveling yesterday, as I was outside and working for about an hour. I shoveled some of the rest of the street, just because.
04. Anyway, while working today, I played (god bless Netflix) a fairly uninteresting Rick Schroeder-starring version of Journey to the Center of the Earth, which was not bad as such, but contained an egregious number of silly scientific errors (dinosaurs lived over a million years ago, says the geologically and paleontologically trained main character). With that around, I also browsed the rest of Mr. Schroeder's oeuvre, and came across two films from my childhood: Earthling (where he stars as a kid orphaned in the outback who is saved by a terminally-ill man going to die in the ruins of his family's settler homestead) and Champs (where he plays Jon Voight's son). I have fond memories of Earthling, in particular, from repeated viewings on what I assume must have been HBO when I was very young.
04. It got me thinking about the number of very sad films I saw when I was small, or at least films with a strongly sad theme in them: Earthling (which ends with 8-year old R.S. burying his mentor and heading "north" back to civilization), Dot and the Kangaroo (the ending of which actually still makes me cry to think about), Raggedy Ann and Andy (the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees being a bittersweet character), and later on, at the end of Quantum Leap Sam never makes it home. Those are just some random items from the list; there are lots more, but I won't list them all.
05. I don't have a lot more to write at this moment. Just wanted to post something and keep things up to date. Have a good night!
121 Days Remaining
01. I started composing this post two days ago on Thursday, where I was writing from home, where I would normally not be at this time on a Thursday, because Baskerville College was closed due to snow. We didn't get hammered quite so hard as points south (apparently Wilmington got about a foot, we seem to be somewhere between 8 and 10 inches at the most), but New Aldwych isn't good with handling snow, and neither is Baskerville's campus, and so we were closed. On the 4th day of the semester. Several students wrote to ask me about how this impacted the class topics for Thursday (are we skipping them, pushing them back to Tuesday next week, or adding them to Tuesday's scheduled class - it's the third option, btw). I went out for a walk yesterday and the accumulated snow from the past few storms is hovering around 2 feet on the ground (and that's after having had intermittent warm days and upper-layer melting). The roads are mostly plowed, although none so well as I would like, and I once again shoveled my car out from a mound of snow (this time on the street, rather than attempting to shovel in-between cars in a parking lot).
02. Though I'm not normally the type to pass around items of utter cuteness, I saw this today and thought it was adorable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBU3BwWpR8Q&feature=player_embedded . It starts off slow, but once the pony starts, it's very cute.
03. Today I've been doing some research and working on various things. It occurred to me that I wish I had a larger and more diversified living space just so I had housework to do, if that makes sense. As it is, here, I get up, have breakfast, and have my computer to work with. I was actually kind of glad to do the snow shoveling yesterday, as I was outside and working for about an hour. I shoveled some of the rest of the street, just because.
04. Anyway, while working today, I played (god bless Netflix) a fairly uninteresting Rick Schroeder-starring version of Journey to the Center of the Earth, which was not bad as such, but contained an egregious number of silly scientific errors (dinosaurs lived over a million years ago, says the geologically and paleontologically trained main character). With that around, I also browsed the rest of Mr. Schroeder's oeuvre, and came across two films from my childhood: Earthling (where he stars as a kid orphaned in the outback who is saved by a terminally-ill man going to die in the ruins of his family's settler homestead) and Champs (where he plays Jon Voight's son). I have fond memories of Earthling, in particular, from repeated viewings on what I assume must have been HBO when I was very young.
04. It got me thinking about the number of very sad films I saw when I was small, or at least films with a strongly sad theme in them: Earthling (which ends with 8-year old R.S. burying his mentor and heading "north" back to civilization), Dot and the Kangaroo (the ending of which actually still makes me cry to think about), Raggedy Ann and Andy (the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees being a bittersweet character), and later on, at the end of Quantum Leap Sam never makes it home. Those are just some random items from the list; there are lots more, but I won't list them all.
05. I don't have a lot more to write at this moment. Just wanted to post something and keep things up to date. Have a good night!
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Sprung Spring Semester
2011.01.25
125 Days Remaining
01. I'm tired as I type this, so today's post will probably not go on for very long. Today was the first day of the Spring Semester at Baskerville College. It started off dark, literally, due to a snowstorm moving through the area. We didn't have much accumulation (I think it got up to 3 inches in some places), and was over around 1pm, but this was the first time I've had to drive in snow while living in New Aldwych. Sadly, several of my neighbors had difficulty, even on paved and completely clear roads (my favorite was the person who wouldn't go above 10 mph on a 35 mph road without any obstructions save the bits of downy-looking, very cold water drifting gently down from the heavens). Once I got to campus (early, mind you, it being the first day) I discovered that plowing was an ongoing project, and it took me 20 minutes to find a parking space. I mention all of that not to gripe, particularly, but to contrast the process of arriving on campus with the actual niceness of the day.
02. I'm teaching only two classes this semester, which is very odd. I have a 3 hour gap between them in the middle of the day, and will have to find ways to entertain myself (actually, I'll be fine - there's a library right there). My first class (1025am-1140am each Tuesday & Thursday) is Medieval Philosophy, which currently has only 8 students enrolled, although a 9th sat in today to see if she'd like it. I'm not particularly looking forward to this class, mostly due to the topic (which is interesting but not energizing, so I leave class tired). That said, the students seemed interested and involved already, and we'll see how that goes. My second class (245-4pm each Tuesday & Thursday) is the Supernatural in American Popular Culture. I love this class, having taught it once before 1.5 years ago. This one has 30 students, and a list of people who wanted to take it but didn't register in time, so even if some drop it, it will very likely fill up. The room is a bit cramped, but bright (very good for a mid-afternoon class, as many students like to take naps at that time of the day, I've noticed), and just from today I could tell the students were very enthusiastic and interested (much eagerness in responding to questions, offering examples, etc.). This was the case even after I told them that the trade off for taking a class that discusses things like vampire erotica, supernatural detectives (from Kolchak the Night Stalker to Hellboy), ghost stories, and the Princess and the Frog is that, "I will work [them] like dogs" with weekly essays and high standards for writing and content, an active participation requirement, and a lot of movie-viewing and book-reading each week. I've already had one student email me excited because the first reading mentioned something from her hometown that she grew up with (the so-called "Dover Demon" from 1977 in Dover, Massachusetts), and I overheard one student comment, as he was leaving class, that he could not wait for this class to start over break. So that all makes me happy. This is my last semester at Baskerville College, and this will be the last class I teach there, I'm very glad it's this one.
03. I had a somewhat surprisingly positive email exchange with my exing-wife yesterday about the divorce procedure, and she updated me about the pets. Everyone is fine, although her cat, Jasper, has apparently gone completely deaf (he no longer hears when she's eating, whereas in the past the sound of food being prepared and/or eaten would bring him running from a sound sleep to beg uproariously for food). When I sent her the divorce document last week I included dog and cat treats for the pets. Mo (the cat we adopted together, my little guy) is fine, skittish and affectionate as ever. Herman, my dog, is fine and was very excited to play in the inch of snow they got last week. She sent me a picture of him, which is basically him sniffing her iPhone camera, so it's very muzzle-prominent. It was the nicest series of emails we've exchanged, tone- and content-wise.
04.a Today on campus, as I walked around between classes through the snowfall, I was struck by how beautiful things, or the world, can be. I'm so very unhappy right now on so many counts, but that's because my perspective is very focused on specific circumstances and constraints in my life. And when I focus outward beyond myself, I am reminded sometimes of a phrase from a Navajo ceremony, which is not (in the ceremony) meant as a description of one's surroundings (it's actually meant as a sort of exhortation for propriety and order), "Beauty behind me, beauty before me." In that spirit, here are some songs that I think are beautiful, though I cannot vouch for the lyrics of the first:
04.b: Neutral Milk Hotel "The King Of Carrot Flowers" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZXtRP3mND0&feature=related is beautiful in part, because it feels to me like it's meaning is...just...over...there...
04.c: Sarah McLachlan "Ice Cream" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAhv0XGv8Pc is one of my three favorite songs
04.d: Midge Ure "Cold, Cold Heart" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2N7FI16K2M is a song I've loved intensely since hearing it on Pierre Robert's radio show on WMMR when I was in high school. I heard it exactly once, remembered the refrain, and finally tracked it down after college. The video is surprisingly enjoyable (desert rocking scenes notwithstanding)
05. And that's about it.
125 Days Remaining
01. I'm tired as I type this, so today's post will probably not go on for very long. Today was the first day of the Spring Semester at Baskerville College. It started off dark, literally, due to a snowstorm moving through the area. We didn't have much accumulation (I think it got up to 3 inches in some places), and was over around 1pm, but this was the first time I've had to drive in snow while living in New Aldwych. Sadly, several of my neighbors had difficulty, even on paved and completely clear roads (my favorite was the person who wouldn't go above 10 mph on a 35 mph road without any obstructions save the bits of downy-looking, very cold water drifting gently down from the heavens). Once I got to campus (early, mind you, it being the first day) I discovered that plowing was an ongoing project, and it took me 20 minutes to find a parking space. I mention all of that not to gripe, particularly, but to contrast the process of arriving on campus with the actual niceness of the day.
02. I'm teaching only two classes this semester, which is very odd. I have a 3 hour gap between them in the middle of the day, and will have to find ways to entertain myself (actually, I'll be fine - there's a library right there). My first class (1025am-1140am each Tuesday & Thursday) is Medieval Philosophy, which currently has only 8 students enrolled, although a 9th sat in today to see if she'd like it. I'm not particularly looking forward to this class, mostly due to the topic (which is interesting but not energizing, so I leave class tired). That said, the students seemed interested and involved already, and we'll see how that goes. My second class (245-4pm each Tuesday & Thursday) is the Supernatural in American Popular Culture. I love this class, having taught it once before 1.5 years ago. This one has 30 students, and a list of people who wanted to take it but didn't register in time, so even if some drop it, it will very likely fill up. The room is a bit cramped, but bright (very good for a mid-afternoon class, as many students like to take naps at that time of the day, I've noticed), and just from today I could tell the students were very enthusiastic and interested (much eagerness in responding to questions, offering examples, etc.). This was the case even after I told them that the trade off for taking a class that discusses things like vampire erotica, supernatural detectives (from Kolchak the Night Stalker to Hellboy), ghost stories, and the Princess and the Frog is that, "I will work [them] like dogs" with weekly essays and high standards for writing and content, an active participation requirement, and a lot of movie-viewing and book-reading each week. I've already had one student email me excited because the first reading mentioned something from her hometown that she grew up with (the so-called "Dover Demon" from 1977 in Dover, Massachusetts), and I overheard one student comment, as he was leaving class, that he could not wait for this class to start over break. So that all makes me happy. This is my last semester at Baskerville College, and this will be the last class I teach there, I'm very glad it's this one.
03. I had a somewhat surprisingly positive email exchange with my exing-wife yesterday about the divorce procedure, and she updated me about the pets. Everyone is fine, although her cat, Jasper, has apparently gone completely deaf (he no longer hears when she's eating, whereas in the past the sound of food being prepared and/or eaten would bring him running from a sound sleep to beg uproariously for food). When I sent her the divorce document last week I included dog and cat treats for the pets. Mo (the cat we adopted together, my little guy) is fine, skittish and affectionate as ever. Herman, my dog, is fine and was very excited to play in the inch of snow they got last week. She sent me a picture of him, which is basically him sniffing her iPhone camera, so it's very muzzle-prominent. It was the nicest series of emails we've exchanged, tone- and content-wise.
04.a Today on campus, as I walked around between classes through the snowfall, I was struck by how beautiful things, or the world, can be. I'm so very unhappy right now on so many counts, but that's because my perspective is very focused on specific circumstances and constraints in my life. And when I focus outward beyond myself, I am reminded sometimes of a phrase from a Navajo ceremony, which is not (in the ceremony) meant as a description of one's surroundings (it's actually meant as a sort of exhortation for propriety and order), "Beauty behind me, beauty before me." In that spirit, here are some songs that I think are beautiful, though I cannot vouch for the lyrics of the first:
04.b: Neutral Milk Hotel "The King Of Carrot Flowers" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZXtRP3mND0&feature=related is beautiful in part, because it feels to me like it's meaning is...just...over...there...
04.c: Sarah McLachlan "Ice Cream" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAhv0XGv8Pc is one of my three favorite songs
04.d: Midge Ure "Cold, Cold Heart" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2N7FI16K2M is a song I've loved intensely since hearing it on Pierre Robert's radio show on WMMR when I was in high school. I heard it exactly once, remembered the refrain, and finally tracked it down after college. The video is surprisingly enjoyable (desert rocking scenes notwithstanding)
05. And that's about it.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Uskglass and Sunlight
2011.01.24
126 Days Remaining
01. First off, happy belated birthday to my sister-in-law (from Saturday) and preemptive happy birthday to my brother-in-law Iunius (tomorrow). Anyway, I received an email from Selena yesterday asking how I have been, since it has been over a week since last I posted and I've been generally reticent, communication-wise. So, first things first: I'm alive.
02. Thursday last week I drove up to Providence to fill out and file the divorce paperwork using the ($66) transcript of the divorce hearing in December. I had to wait until I had money to pay the remaining $26, and that meant after my paycheck on the 15th, followed by MLK, Jr. Day, and appointments on campus. So I drove up and filled out the Findings of Fact and Settlement Terms dictated by the magistrate. I did this by hand, and went to turn it in. Then I discovered that the forms had to be signed by the magistrate who had presided, which was interesting since no one had mentioned that before, and he wasn't scheduled to be in that day. Then someone tracked him down (so very fortuitous) in the building. So he signed the papers, I was given my copies, and then the clerk said, "You know this isn't the final judgment, right?" I said, "No, I didn't." It turns out that I have to wait 3 more months, after which I can (I'm not making this up) fill out all of the same information on another form, get it signed by the magistrate, and then I'll be divorced. So I have one more trip to Providence after 21 April (I know now to call ahead and make sure this is on a day when the magistrate is present in the building), at which point my marriage will be finally ended.
03. After that process I mailed a copy of the interim form to my exing-wife, then went grocery shopping (Providence has three Whole Foods Markets) and then drove home in the falling darkness. I got home and emotionally curled up inside into a ball. Aside from the lack of any clear guidelines made available by the Family Court in Providence, one benefit that I might have had from doing this via a lawyer would have been being able to avoid the repeated personal trips to and from divorce court, which have each time left me feeling raw and scraped inside. And this is without any complicated property or custody settlements that needed negotiating. I think that, given the frequency of divorce in our society, we could really do a better job of organizing it and running the procedure, both for low-conflict divorces like mine and ones with more issues to settle.
04. So that was why I didn't really communicate much over the weekend. I felt shell-shocked, especially by the news that there is one more step to take before this is finally done. Our society really, really, wants people to be married and not to get divorced, as evidenced by the ease with which one can get married ($35 and ten minutes) versus the difficulty with which one can get divorced (over $300 in fees and 8 months).
05. Anyway, onto other topics. I recently downloaded to iTunes the CDs for an audiobook I picked up several months ago, Susanna Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. Clarke's wonderful novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is one of my favorite books, and the short stories in LoGA are equally elegant and, to me, captivating. This morning as I sat down to work through my inbox and do final tweaks on my syllabi (first day of classes is tomorrow), I played the final story, "John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner," which I have never actually read (the book collects previously published stories, with this final one being written for the collection), and was struck again by the loveliness of language well used (and full credit to the narrator/reader, Simon Prebble - Davina Porter narrates other stories in the audiobook). For any in the know, John Uskglass is the name of the character otherwise called the Raven King in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and this particular short story purports to be a retelling of a medieval story about said character. It is exceptionally well done, and at points made me laugh out loud as I listened to it.
06. I mention the aesthetic pleasures of reading (or, in this case, listening) in part because I recently saw a review of Stanley Fish's newest book on writing, How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One, wherein Fish argues that American prose has been somewhat handicapped by the preeminence of Strunk and White's Elements of Style and the fame of native authors like Hemingway (both the guidebook and the literary author preferred a type of prose that avoids ornament in favor of short, direct language and phrasing). I'm intrigued to read Fish's book, because apparently he argues not for abandoning Strunk & White, but for teaching them as one type of prose, to be mastered along with others. This intrigues me due to an ongoing thinking I've been doing about purported Ebonics, American dialects and idioms, and the grammar of some types of popular music (which can also influence things like spelling and punctuation). Although I am not a classicist in the technical sense (I read Greek and Latin poorly and god help me if I had to produce new work in either language with any rapidity), I have had to learn a fair amount about language, and have actually engaged in discussions (sometimes arguments) about whether there is such a thing as "proper" English against which any one person's individual speech (their idiolect) should be measured. I have come down increasingly against the formalist position that there is some sort of True English (or any other language) and instead see any one "language" as composed of the various idiolects of everyone who speaks it (thus languages can blend into each other at their margins and are only clearly marked off when two people become unable to converse fluently though they may be able to basically understand one another).
07. This has led me to think about the ways to teach language arts, writing, etc. in the classroom (as a former writing tutor and current teacher who works to improve my students' writing abilities, this is a big deal to me). I wonder whether teaching writing and style as dialects (how would one say "X" in formal business prose? In middle-class everyday speech? In a hip-hop song? My wonder is whether that might be a way to avoid the power conflicts that seem to come about with teaching kids that they should speak a specific way, and instead teach them how to do so in order that they could maneuver effectively in different social settings. I got thinking about this years ago when I was doing some research into how creolization works (cultures often work like languages in interesting ways, so I was doing this work while thinking about how two different cultures can influence one another and create something new between them). The example that struck me most forcefully was from British Guyana, where a single individual (interviewed for the article) switched between Creole, Queen's English, and American English with a great deal of facility in the midst of a single event (a wedding). To upper-class guests she spoke Queen's English, to the linguist American English, and to the guests who were misbehaving, she spoke Creole. Sidney Poitier's character alludes to a similar multi-dialectality in To Sir, With Love, where his character is from British Guyana but trained in the US and teaches in the UK. The character spoke very formal English without a British accent as he negotiated his place as a teacher in British society. I wonder if that sort of approach might make it clearer to students that they are not being asked to replace their speech, but to see language as a tool they can master and use on their own (and, I would hope, to enjoy observing how others use it as well, as I do when I read or hear Susanna Clarke's stories).
08. Belisarius commented a while ago that my blog-voice is very similar to my email-voice, and that they are both very similar to my speaking voice. On the other hand, there is very little profanity in my blog-voice, and far fewer digressions (one assumes because I'm not directly interacting with anyone to draw a new topic into the mix, and because I can structure these posts deliberately, though I usually just list topics). My students and I have discussed teachers' self-presentation and speaking styles; I'm very informal nowadays, though I was much more formal when I started. I don't know for sure why I don't seem to change my voice very much, I think it's a sign of comfort with my normal interlocutors (all of you); I'm very likely to be more polite and formal with strangers, though once I get excited I start talking normally again. Hrm.
09. It's sunny out. We had snow again on Friday, though I haven't had any call to go outside since then. I'm doing laundry this afternoon, though, and will need to go outside to the laundry room to do so. Thankfully the sidewalks are shoveled.
10. And that's about it.
126 Days Remaining
01. First off, happy belated birthday to my sister-in-law (from Saturday) and preemptive happy birthday to my brother-in-law Iunius (tomorrow). Anyway, I received an email from Selena yesterday asking how I have been, since it has been over a week since last I posted and I've been generally reticent, communication-wise. So, first things first: I'm alive.
02. Thursday last week I drove up to Providence to fill out and file the divorce paperwork using the ($66) transcript of the divorce hearing in December. I had to wait until I had money to pay the remaining $26, and that meant after my paycheck on the 15th, followed by MLK, Jr. Day, and appointments on campus. So I drove up and filled out the Findings of Fact and Settlement Terms dictated by the magistrate. I did this by hand, and went to turn it in. Then I discovered that the forms had to be signed by the magistrate who had presided, which was interesting since no one had mentioned that before, and he wasn't scheduled to be in that day. Then someone tracked him down (so very fortuitous) in the building. So he signed the papers, I was given my copies, and then the clerk said, "You know this isn't the final judgment, right?" I said, "No, I didn't." It turns out that I have to wait 3 more months, after which I can (I'm not making this up) fill out all of the same information on another form, get it signed by the magistrate, and then I'll be divorced. So I have one more trip to Providence after 21 April (I know now to call ahead and make sure this is on a day when the magistrate is present in the building), at which point my marriage will be finally ended.
03. After that process I mailed a copy of the interim form to my exing-wife, then went grocery shopping (Providence has three Whole Foods Markets) and then drove home in the falling darkness. I got home and emotionally curled up inside into a ball. Aside from the lack of any clear guidelines made available by the Family Court in Providence, one benefit that I might have had from doing this via a lawyer would have been being able to avoid the repeated personal trips to and from divorce court, which have each time left me feeling raw and scraped inside. And this is without any complicated property or custody settlements that needed negotiating. I think that, given the frequency of divorce in our society, we could really do a better job of organizing it and running the procedure, both for low-conflict divorces like mine and ones with more issues to settle.
04. So that was why I didn't really communicate much over the weekend. I felt shell-shocked, especially by the news that there is one more step to take before this is finally done. Our society really, really, wants people to be married and not to get divorced, as evidenced by the ease with which one can get married ($35 and ten minutes) versus the difficulty with which one can get divorced (over $300 in fees and 8 months).
05. Anyway, onto other topics. I recently downloaded to iTunes the CDs for an audiobook I picked up several months ago, Susanna Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. Clarke's wonderful novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is one of my favorite books, and the short stories in LoGA are equally elegant and, to me, captivating. This morning as I sat down to work through my inbox and do final tweaks on my syllabi (first day of classes is tomorrow), I played the final story, "John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner," which I have never actually read (the book collects previously published stories, with this final one being written for the collection), and was struck again by the loveliness of language well used (and full credit to the narrator/reader, Simon Prebble - Davina Porter narrates other stories in the audiobook). For any in the know, John Uskglass is the name of the character otherwise called the Raven King in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and this particular short story purports to be a retelling of a medieval story about said character. It is exceptionally well done, and at points made me laugh out loud as I listened to it.
06. I mention the aesthetic pleasures of reading (or, in this case, listening) in part because I recently saw a review of Stanley Fish's newest book on writing, How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One, wherein Fish argues that American prose has been somewhat handicapped by the preeminence of Strunk and White's Elements of Style and the fame of native authors like Hemingway (both the guidebook and the literary author preferred a type of prose that avoids ornament in favor of short, direct language and phrasing). I'm intrigued to read Fish's book, because apparently he argues not for abandoning Strunk & White, but for teaching them as one type of prose, to be mastered along with others. This intrigues me due to an ongoing thinking I've been doing about purported Ebonics, American dialects and idioms, and the grammar of some types of popular music (which can also influence things like spelling and punctuation). Although I am not a classicist in the technical sense (I read Greek and Latin poorly and god help me if I had to produce new work in either language with any rapidity), I have had to learn a fair amount about language, and have actually engaged in discussions (sometimes arguments) about whether there is such a thing as "proper" English against which any one person's individual speech (their idiolect) should be measured. I have come down increasingly against the formalist position that there is some sort of True English (or any other language) and instead see any one "language" as composed of the various idiolects of everyone who speaks it (thus languages can blend into each other at their margins and are only clearly marked off when two people become unable to converse fluently though they may be able to basically understand one another).
07. This has led me to think about the ways to teach language arts, writing, etc. in the classroom (as a former writing tutor and current teacher who works to improve my students' writing abilities, this is a big deal to me). I wonder whether teaching writing and style as dialects (how would one say "X" in formal business prose? In middle-class everyday speech? In a hip-hop song? My wonder is whether that might be a way to avoid the power conflicts that seem to come about with teaching kids that they should speak a specific way, and instead teach them how to do so in order that they could maneuver effectively in different social settings. I got thinking about this years ago when I was doing some research into how creolization works (cultures often work like languages in interesting ways, so I was doing this work while thinking about how two different cultures can influence one another and create something new between them). The example that struck me most forcefully was from British Guyana, where a single individual (interviewed for the article) switched between Creole, Queen's English, and American English with a great deal of facility in the midst of a single event (a wedding). To upper-class guests she spoke Queen's English, to the linguist American English, and to the guests who were misbehaving, she spoke Creole. Sidney Poitier's character alludes to a similar multi-dialectality in To Sir, With Love, where his character is from British Guyana but trained in the US and teaches in the UK. The character spoke very formal English without a British accent as he negotiated his place as a teacher in British society. I wonder if that sort of approach might make it clearer to students that they are not being asked to replace their speech, but to see language as a tool they can master and use on their own (and, I would hope, to enjoy observing how others use it as well, as I do when I read or hear Susanna Clarke's stories).
08. Belisarius commented a while ago that my blog-voice is very similar to my email-voice, and that they are both very similar to my speaking voice. On the other hand, there is very little profanity in my blog-voice, and far fewer digressions (one assumes because I'm not directly interacting with anyone to draw a new topic into the mix, and because I can structure these posts deliberately, though I usually just list topics). My students and I have discussed teachers' self-presentation and speaking styles; I'm very informal nowadays, though I was much more formal when I started. I don't know for sure why I don't seem to change my voice very much, I think it's a sign of comfort with my normal interlocutors (all of you); I'm very likely to be more polite and formal with strangers, though once I get excited I start talking normally again. Hrm.
09. It's sunny out. We had snow again on Friday, though I haven't had any call to go outside since then. I'm doing laundry this afternoon, though, and will need to go outside to the laundry room to do so. Thankfully the sidewalks are shoveled.
10. And that's about it.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Ed Teach's Sword, Discovered
2011.01.15
135 Days Remaining
01. Today I walked (having decided that I need the exercise) to the grocery store. The walk to the store was only slightly more strenuous than normal (I probably walk there as much as I drive - according to Yahoo Maps it's approximately 2.25 miles each way) due to the ongoing lack of consistent plowing or shoveling along my route, but I have no particular issue with walking carefully on packed snow, or climbing over small disorganized hills of plowed snow. The walk back, on the other hand, was somewhat more difficult, as I purchased more than I had intended upon setting out. I mention that not to complain about my sore arms and hands (carrying those plastic bags any significant by hand is a royal pain), but to mention that as I was walking up a hill along my route, a man pulled up beside me and asked where I was going, offering to drive me. I had the same thing happen (though with a different man) back in October when I was doing the same walk (though there wasn't snow on the ground, and I wasn't carrying so much that time). So that's two people who've spontaneously offered to help me out when seeing me carry heavy loads. I just thought I'd mention this, as evidence that people can be nice for no other reason than to be nice.
02. I enjoy spending money. Not throwing it away on ridiculous things. I like the feeling of paying bills and buying goods or services and saying, "I paid for that." One of the things I can't (or won't because this place feels so temporary) do here is stock my kitchen fully and properly. When I left my ex-wife I kept only a small portion of our foodstuffs, including the spices, flour, etc. So I'm working without anything like a functional base when cooking. Add to that the lack of proper pots and pans, and I feel like a wet-behind-the-ears college graduate, rather than a man in his mid-30s. Today at the grocery store, thinking of my limited cabinet space and restricted functionality, I looked at things I would like to buy, of recipes I don't have the means to cook, and of the cookware I don't currently own. Someday. Tomorrow, anyway, I'm having pancakes, having bought maple syrup today.
03. Lavinia emailed me today to say that her Black Lab puppy, Zeke, was undergoing surgery because apparently he ate some sort of stuffed animal stuffing and was unable to digest it. She indicated that he was apparently coming through surgery okay, but I feel for both her and the dog that this happened. Poor little guy. Speaking of dogs, on my walk today I passed a couple out walking their Corgi, who is so short that it can't see over the shoveled snow. If I wasn't directly behind them, I would have thought they were using one of those silly "invisible dog" rigid leashes. It was very cute.
04. The semester is coming up quickly, and one of the events of the Spring has already started: requests for recommendation letters for next year's semester abroad programs. I don't particularly mind doing the letters, but I sometimes wonder how seriously they're taken. I suspect the letters are just a pro forma part of the application packet.
05. Oh! I forgot to mention yesterday that Iunia lost her first baby tooth two nights ago. My girl is getting bigger all the time. I remember being excited when she got her first baby tooth.
06. YahooNews posted an article from the ongoing excavation of the Queen Anne's Revenge, the flagship of Blackbeard, my all-time most favoritest pirate ever. Apparently a sword was found which, for some reason, the excavators think may have belonged to Thatch himself. A word of explanation: many (though not all) of the pirates in the early 18th century had noms de guerre to prevent the stigmatization of their families, and Blackbeard was no exception. He was actually known by the name Edward T-ch (variously spelled "Thatch," "Teach," "Tach," "Theatch," etc.), but that was probably not his birth name, and then it got even more complicated as his fame spread and he was given the nickname "Blackbeard" (because, interestingly, he had a black beard worn long - onomastically imaginative, the early 18th century press was not). So why is he my most favoritest pirate ever? Because, despite his fearsome reputation, he actually mostly scared the living hell out of people, rather than being a butcher (he was very media-savvy, and cultivated the image of a monstrous murderer, but in fact seems to have preferred not murdering people whenever he could avoid it). His crew was found, during their trial after his death (he commanded several ships, and while everyone with him on his last day died, 16 other crewmen were arrested later elsewhere) to be racially integrated, an interesting example of why the pirates of the Caribbean are worth more study and thinking - there's one school of thinking that pirate ships were more like republics than dictatorships (fictionalized accounts notwithstanding, pirate crews served under what was called "free suffrage" and were not subject to the captain's autocratic whims), and more egalitarian, in racial and socio-economic terms, than anything else in European cultures of the time.
07. Anyway, despite all of his apparent preference for threat over violence to achieve his goals, when the chips were down, Blackbeard went out like nobody's business. From the firsthand accounts, when he was captured and killed on 22 November 1718, he was one of the angriest human beings on the planet, possibly ever. After the entire rest of his crew were dead, it took all of the remaining British soldiers involved to wrestle him down and kill him. The official report noted that he had been shot 5 times (and we're talking pistols and muskets, the latter of which leave grapefruit-sized holes in people) and stabbed/cut at least 20 times. He had to be actively wrestled down after someone came up behind him and slit his throat with a knife. He individually sustained wounds that would have killed several other people if the wounds were distributed one per person. In one later retelling, it only stopped when they actually cut off his head, and he couldn't bite the people holding him down anymore. I mean, JESUS CHRIST. If you're going to go, go hard.
08. Speaking of Blackbeard, he'll be portrayed by Ian McShane in the upcoming fourth Pirates of the Caribbean films, subtitled On Stranger Tides (based on the excellent novel by Tim Powers). I mention McShane because I've been thinking about television the past few days, having spent so much time over the past semester watching old shows on Netflix. Last semester one of my students asked what my favorite TV show was, and I didn't have a ready answer, but I do, in fact, have two shows I would consider my favorites, different though they may be: The Adventures of Pete and Pete and Deadwood (starring Ian McShane, among others). In tone, focus, and them, these shows have nothing in common other than being non-big 3 network productions (AoP&P was done by Nickelodeon, and Deadwood by HBO), but AoP&P depicts a world that I wish were real, and Deadwood just has some of the most psychologically complicated and artful storytelling I've ever seen (including the final episode of the first season, which is actually my single favorite episode of any television ever).
09. I shaved off my beard a few days ago, mostly because I've decided to grow it all out, instead of just the Van Dyke, for the winter months, and it's less of a nuisance to just start it from scratch rather than having a multi-tiered beard for several weeks. But, and I always forget this, it itches in the early stages of growth. Blackbeard, I am not.
10. And that's about it.
135 Days Remaining
01. Today I walked (having decided that I need the exercise) to the grocery store. The walk to the store was only slightly more strenuous than normal (I probably walk there as much as I drive - according to Yahoo Maps it's approximately 2.25 miles each way) due to the ongoing lack of consistent plowing or shoveling along my route, but I have no particular issue with walking carefully on packed snow, or climbing over small disorganized hills of plowed snow. The walk back, on the other hand, was somewhat more difficult, as I purchased more than I had intended upon setting out. I mention that not to complain about my sore arms and hands (carrying those plastic bags any significant by hand is a royal pain), but to mention that as I was walking up a hill along my route, a man pulled up beside me and asked where I was going, offering to drive me. I had the same thing happen (though with a different man) back in October when I was doing the same walk (though there wasn't snow on the ground, and I wasn't carrying so much that time). So that's two people who've spontaneously offered to help me out when seeing me carry heavy loads. I just thought I'd mention this, as evidence that people can be nice for no other reason than to be nice.
02. I enjoy spending money. Not throwing it away on ridiculous things. I like the feeling of paying bills and buying goods or services and saying, "I paid for that." One of the things I can't (or won't because this place feels so temporary) do here is stock my kitchen fully and properly. When I left my ex-wife I kept only a small portion of our foodstuffs, including the spices, flour, etc. So I'm working without anything like a functional base when cooking. Add to that the lack of proper pots and pans, and I feel like a wet-behind-the-ears college graduate, rather than a man in his mid-30s. Today at the grocery store, thinking of my limited cabinet space and restricted functionality, I looked at things I would like to buy, of recipes I don't have the means to cook, and of the cookware I don't currently own. Someday. Tomorrow, anyway, I'm having pancakes, having bought maple syrup today.
03. Lavinia emailed me today to say that her Black Lab puppy, Zeke, was undergoing surgery because apparently he ate some sort of stuffed animal stuffing and was unable to digest it. She indicated that he was apparently coming through surgery okay, but I feel for both her and the dog that this happened. Poor little guy. Speaking of dogs, on my walk today I passed a couple out walking their Corgi, who is so short that it can't see over the shoveled snow. If I wasn't directly behind them, I would have thought they were using one of those silly "invisible dog" rigid leashes. It was very cute.
04. The semester is coming up quickly, and one of the events of the Spring has already started: requests for recommendation letters for next year's semester abroad programs. I don't particularly mind doing the letters, but I sometimes wonder how seriously they're taken. I suspect the letters are just a pro forma part of the application packet.
05. Oh! I forgot to mention yesterday that Iunia lost her first baby tooth two nights ago. My girl is getting bigger all the time. I remember being excited when she got her first baby tooth.
06. YahooNews posted an article from the ongoing excavation of the Queen Anne's Revenge, the flagship of Blackbeard, my all-time most favoritest pirate ever. Apparently a sword was found which, for some reason, the excavators think may have belonged to Thatch himself. A word of explanation: many (though not all) of the pirates in the early 18th century had noms de guerre to prevent the stigmatization of their families, and Blackbeard was no exception. He was actually known by the name Edward T-ch (variously spelled "Thatch," "Teach," "Tach," "Theatch," etc.), but that was probably not his birth name, and then it got even more complicated as his fame spread and he was given the nickname "Blackbeard" (because, interestingly, he had a black beard worn long - onomastically imaginative, the early 18th century press was not). So why is he my most favoritest pirate ever? Because, despite his fearsome reputation, he actually mostly scared the living hell out of people, rather than being a butcher (he was very media-savvy, and cultivated the image of a monstrous murderer, but in fact seems to have preferred not murdering people whenever he could avoid it). His crew was found, during their trial after his death (he commanded several ships, and while everyone with him on his last day died, 16 other crewmen were arrested later elsewhere) to be racially integrated, an interesting example of why the pirates of the Caribbean are worth more study and thinking - there's one school of thinking that pirate ships were more like republics than dictatorships (fictionalized accounts notwithstanding, pirate crews served under what was called "free suffrage" and were not subject to the captain's autocratic whims), and more egalitarian, in racial and socio-economic terms, than anything else in European cultures of the time.
07. Anyway, despite all of his apparent preference for threat over violence to achieve his goals, when the chips were down, Blackbeard went out like nobody's business. From the firsthand accounts, when he was captured and killed on 22 November 1718, he was one of the angriest human beings on the planet, possibly ever. After the entire rest of his crew were dead, it took all of the remaining British soldiers involved to wrestle him down and kill him. The official report noted that he had been shot 5 times (and we're talking pistols and muskets, the latter of which leave grapefruit-sized holes in people) and stabbed/cut at least 20 times. He had to be actively wrestled down after someone came up behind him and slit his throat with a knife. He individually sustained wounds that would have killed several other people if the wounds were distributed one per person. In one later retelling, it only stopped when they actually cut off his head, and he couldn't bite the people holding him down anymore. I mean, JESUS CHRIST. If you're going to go, go hard.
08. Speaking of Blackbeard, he'll be portrayed by Ian McShane in the upcoming fourth Pirates of the Caribbean films, subtitled On Stranger Tides (based on the excellent novel by Tim Powers). I mention McShane because I've been thinking about television the past few days, having spent so much time over the past semester watching old shows on Netflix. Last semester one of my students asked what my favorite TV show was, and I didn't have a ready answer, but I do, in fact, have two shows I would consider my favorites, different though they may be: The Adventures of Pete and Pete and Deadwood (starring Ian McShane, among others). In tone, focus, and them, these shows have nothing in common other than being non-big 3 network productions (AoP&P was done by Nickelodeon, and Deadwood by HBO), but AoP&P depicts a world that I wish were real, and Deadwood just has some of the most psychologically complicated and artful storytelling I've ever seen (including the final episode of the first season, which is actually my single favorite episode of any television ever).
09. I shaved off my beard a few days ago, mostly because I've decided to grow it all out, instead of just the Van Dyke, for the winter months, and it's less of a nuisance to just start it from scratch rather than having a multi-tiered beard for several weeks. But, and I always forget this, it itches in the early stages of growth. Blackbeard, I am not.
10. And that's about it.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Ophiucus, if you please
2011.01.15
136 Days Remaining
01. Here it is, 1230am and I'm still wide awake. My sleep cycle has gone completely farcockt (random etymological note: farcockt is Yiddish for "gone awry" or "messed up") and sometime in the next week I'm going to have to force myself back onto a more civilized schedule that involves sleeping when the sun is down and waking up when it rises. Thank god my bedding here is incredibly uncomfortable, otherwise I'd stay down for all of the hours of daylight. There's no central theme here, just a bunch of random thoughts, ideas, and topics.
02. I got paid today, which is good because I've been living on pasta + sauce and leftover chili for the past week and a half. I love both of those dishes, but prefer my pasta sauce with lots of vegetables in it, and my chili on a less day-by-day basis. I was planning on grocery shopping today, but the temperature barely got to 22 degrees and my car is actually buried in snow in the parking lot. Tomorrow will be warmer, so I elected to not spend hours of sub-freezing temperature today in a thoroughly-shaded parking lot at the end of a wind tunnel digging my car out with my hands. Call me crazy.
03. So instead I walked up to the local Subway franchise and convenience store. This was my first real walk since the major snowfall on Tuesday/Wednesday. The actual amount of snow on the ground varied a lot from one block to the next, but it seems to have been at least a foot everywhere, and closer to two feet in some spots (although that's the far end of the scale: 16-18 inches were the most common measurements I made as I walked). This reminds me of Syracuse winters, although without as much snow. I was somewhat frustrated by the lack of consistent sidewalk shoveling, especially because I timed my walk to coincide with the warmest part of the day (between 2 and 3pm) and saw schoolkids get off buses and have to literally climb over hills of snow or walk in the roads because they couldn't use the sidewalks.
04. Over the past few days I've been watching (ah, Netflix) the SciFi (now Syfy) Channel show Eureka, about a secret government town in Oregon where all the supergeniuses live and make life interesting for the non-genius (lovable everyman) sheriff. I've been sort of astonished by the fact that it is very entertaining, though formulaic (which characteristic is probably enhanced for me because I'm watching the episodes in close succession). The astonishment arises because the Syfy Channel's original movies are appallingly bad, and their "real life" shows like Ghost Hunters and Destination Truth are silly (although I enjoy watching both). Eureka, though, actually has some substance to it, though it's got a fair amount of whimsy, irony, and formula to it. If anything, the weakest parts of its design are shared by many other SciFi or Fantasy genre shows: a) most episodes involve something of a "monster of the week" theme where there is some horrifying disaster/threat that will EXTERMINATE ALL HUMANITY unless the hero can do something, and b) its attention to emotional and psychological character development trends towards the bathetic, which I find annoying (this was one of the things that killed the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel shows for me - drama for the sake of drama and not for any good internal plot or character reasons). I'm increasingly in alignment with Tolkien on this one, and mistrust open-ended storytelling series, as they fall too easily into regular repetition and bathos. All of that said, the show is generally fun, and I've enjoyed watching it.
05. Five Songs:
05.a for some reason today when the song "Hand Me Down" by Visqueen came up on my iTunes shuffle it caught my particular attention (I think that I particularly like the sound of the chorus). I can't find a formal version on YouTube, but I did find a minimalist, well-miked version. I like the use of the electric cello in this version.
05.b Also in my head recently: Liz Phair's Stratford-on-Guy, again for the chorus (in this case with a particular type of resonant, jangly guitar playing that I have always liked - you can hear its precursors in some Buddy Holly and Bobby Fuller, and a lyric I've never been able to decipher and refuse to look up).
05.c One of my 3 favorite songs is the Talking Heads' "And She Was," because it made a long-ago unhappy time of my life bright for one serene morning.
05.d I love Neko Case (whether as a solo artist or part of the New Pornographers), and this song combines the sort of deep sound I referred to last week or so (about Arcade Fire's "Modern Man") and some of the jangly guitar I'm talking about today: "Animal." I also empathize with the line "I do my best but I'm made of mistakes."
05.e Finally, Dar Williams' "The Ocean." This song is one of the ways I think about what God might be like, when I am inclined to think about such topics.
06. I don't want to talk about Jared Loughner anymore. The facts, as they come out, increasingly triangulate in on mental health issues, rather than partisan rhetoric, as the most salient cause for his actions, with a side of very problematically lax gun control laws and procedures (fun historical fact: Arizona had tougher gun regulations when Wyatt Earp was sheriff of Tombstone in the Wild West than it does now). But both of those issues are effectively off the table in any serious fashion, because involuntary committing of the insane is incredibly complicated (and with good reason - it's easy to abuse) and our national gun control discussion is pretty much DOA with the only two voices (one of which is pretty much a tiny whisper in the wilderness nowadays) urging zero regulation or complete ban (this is the one in the wilderness, btw). Any attempt to suggest that complete lack of regulations isn't a good idea is often (and I'm not talking about conversations among policy wonks or those who think about this seriously - I'm talking about the publicly stated positions of Tea Partiers and NRA-funded spokespersons) seen as a ploy to get towards a total ban. Which I see as equivalent to saying that Stop signs are a step towards banning cars. Those of you who shoot or own guns, I'm curious to hear your take(s) on this: is the Loughner case a good argument for stronger enforcement of existing regulations, for more regulations, or irrelevant to gun control laws in general?
07. I noted with some curiosity the over-hyped storm about the "sudden" announcement that the constellations' arrangement relative to the Earth changes over time, and that this means that (if one is using sidereal astrology) there are now 13 relevant constellations, rather than 12. First of all, astronomers and astrologers (they used to be the same thing, btw) have known about this phenomenon for over 2,000 years (closer to 2,250 years, actually). Second, it doesn't impact the dominant type of astrology in Europe, North or South America (which is tropical, not sidereal). On the upside, if we did use sidereal astrology, I'm one of the people who would be effected, as the "new" 13th sign's birthdate range is from late November to December 17th. Thus, I would now by an Ophiucus, rather than a Sagittarius. This, I think, is kind of neat, as Ophiucus (previously known in the medieval West by its Latin name, Serpentarius) means "serpent-holder." On the other hand, according to tropical astrology, I am exactly the person I should be based on my birthdate. It's uncanny, how much I have the predicted characteristics. And since no one has figured out the import of the Ophiucus birth sign...alas, I'll have to depend on Sagittarius to guide me further. Still, snakes are cool.
08. And now, having fooled around on YouTube looking for links and listening to music, it's 230am. Good night, or good morning.
136 Days Remaining
01. Here it is, 1230am and I'm still wide awake. My sleep cycle has gone completely farcockt (random etymological note: farcockt is Yiddish for "gone awry" or "messed up") and sometime in the next week I'm going to have to force myself back onto a more civilized schedule that involves sleeping when the sun is down and waking up when it rises. Thank god my bedding here is incredibly uncomfortable, otherwise I'd stay down for all of the hours of daylight. There's no central theme here, just a bunch of random thoughts, ideas, and topics.
02. I got paid today, which is good because I've been living on pasta + sauce and leftover chili for the past week and a half. I love both of those dishes, but prefer my pasta sauce with lots of vegetables in it, and my chili on a less day-by-day basis. I was planning on grocery shopping today, but the temperature barely got to 22 degrees and my car is actually buried in snow in the parking lot. Tomorrow will be warmer, so I elected to not spend hours of sub-freezing temperature today in a thoroughly-shaded parking lot at the end of a wind tunnel digging my car out with my hands. Call me crazy.
03. So instead I walked up to the local Subway franchise and convenience store. This was my first real walk since the major snowfall on Tuesday/Wednesday. The actual amount of snow on the ground varied a lot from one block to the next, but it seems to have been at least a foot everywhere, and closer to two feet in some spots (although that's the far end of the scale: 16-18 inches were the most common measurements I made as I walked). This reminds me of Syracuse winters, although without as much snow. I was somewhat frustrated by the lack of consistent sidewalk shoveling, especially because I timed my walk to coincide with the warmest part of the day (between 2 and 3pm) and saw schoolkids get off buses and have to literally climb over hills of snow or walk in the roads because they couldn't use the sidewalks.
04. Over the past few days I've been watching (ah, Netflix) the SciFi (now Syfy) Channel show Eureka, about a secret government town in Oregon where all the supergeniuses live and make life interesting for the non-genius (lovable everyman) sheriff. I've been sort of astonished by the fact that it is very entertaining, though formulaic (which characteristic is probably enhanced for me because I'm watching the episodes in close succession). The astonishment arises because the Syfy Channel's original movies are appallingly bad, and their "real life" shows like Ghost Hunters and Destination Truth are silly (although I enjoy watching both). Eureka, though, actually has some substance to it, though it's got a fair amount of whimsy, irony, and formula to it. If anything, the weakest parts of its design are shared by many other SciFi or Fantasy genre shows: a) most episodes involve something of a "monster of the week" theme where there is some horrifying disaster/threat that will EXTERMINATE ALL HUMANITY unless the hero can do something, and b) its attention to emotional and psychological character development trends towards the bathetic, which I find annoying (this was one of the things that killed the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel shows for me - drama for the sake of drama and not for any good internal plot or character reasons). I'm increasingly in alignment with Tolkien on this one, and mistrust open-ended storytelling series, as they fall too easily into regular repetition and bathos. All of that said, the show is generally fun, and I've enjoyed watching it.
05. Five Songs:
05.a for some reason today when the song "Hand Me Down" by Visqueen came up on my iTunes shuffle it caught my particular attention (I think that I particularly like the sound of the chorus). I can't find a formal version on YouTube, but I did find a minimalist, well-miked version. I like the use of the electric cello in this version.
05.b Also in my head recently: Liz Phair's Stratford-on-Guy, again for the chorus (in this case with a particular type of resonant, jangly guitar playing that I have always liked - you can hear its precursors in some Buddy Holly and Bobby Fuller, and a lyric I've never been able to decipher and refuse to look up).
05.c One of my 3 favorite songs is the Talking Heads' "And She Was," because it made a long-ago unhappy time of my life bright for one serene morning.
05.d I love Neko Case (whether as a solo artist or part of the New Pornographers), and this song combines the sort of deep sound I referred to last week or so (about Arcade Fire's "Modern Man") and some of the jangly guitar I'm talking about today: "Animal." I also empathize with the line "I do my best but I'm made of mistakes."
05.e Finally, Dar Williams' "The Ocean." This song is one of the ways I think about what God might be like, when I am inclined to think about such topics.
06. I don't want to talk about Jared Loughner anymore. The facts, as they come out, increasingly triangulate in on mental health issues, rather than partisan rhetoric, as the most salient cause for his actions, with a side of very problematically lax gun control laws and procedures (fun historical fact: Arizona had tougher gun regulations when Wyatt Earp was sheriff of Tombstone in the Wild West than it does now). But both of those issues are effectively off the table in any serious fashion, because involuntary committing of the insane is incredibly complicated (and with good reason - it's easy to abuse) and our national gun control discussion is pretty much DOA with the only two voices (one of which is pretty much a tiny whisper in the wilderness nowadays) urging zero regulation or complete ban (this is the one in the wilderness, btw). Any attempt to suggest that complete lack of regulations isn't a good idea is often (and I'm not talking about conversations among policy wonks or those who think about this seriously - I'm talking about the publicly stated positions of Tea Partiers and NRA-funded spokespersons) seen as a ploy to get towards a total ban. Which I see as equivalent to saying that Stop signs are a step towards banning cars. Those of you who shoot or own guns, I'm curious to hear your take(s) on this: is the Loughner case a good argument for stronger enforcement of existing regulations, for more regulations, or irrelevant to gun control laws in general?
07. I noted with some curiosity the over-hyped storm about the "sudden" announcement that the constellations' arrangement relative to the Earth changes over time, and that this means that (if one is using sidereal astrology) there are now 13 relevant constellations, rather than 12. First of all, astronomers and astrologers (they used to be the same thing, btw) have known about this phenomenon for over 2,000 years (closer to 2,250 years, actually). Second, it doesn't impact the dominant type of astrology in Europe, North or South America (which is tropical, not sidereal). On the upside, if we did use sidereal astrology, I'm one of the people who would be effected, as the "new" 13th sign's birthdate range is from late November to December 17th. Thus, I would now by an Ophiucus, rather than a Sagittarius. This, I think, is kind of neat, as Ophiucus (previously known in the medieval West by its Latin name, Serpentarius) means "serpent-holder." On the other hand, according to tropical astrology, I am exactly the person I should be based on my birthdate. It's uncanny, how much I have the predicted characteristics. And since no one has figured out the import of the Ophiucus birth sign...alas, I'll have to depend on Sagittarius to guide me further. Still, snakes are cool.
08. And now, having fooled around on YouTube looking for links and listening to music, it's 230am. Good night, or good morning.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
2011.01.11
140 Days Remaining
01. So, this will be brief, but there are a few interesting things that took place today, and I wanted to jot them down before going to bed.
02. I haven't been sleeping well the past week or so; I'm unable to fall asleep until very, very late, and then have a proportionately later waking time. This is very likely at least in part due to being somewhat depressed, but it also is simply part of a vicious cycle. Last night I moved to break the cycle by going to bed at 1030pm. I was awake until about midnight, but I woke up at 8am feeling rested and ready to go. So of course I stayed in bed a bit longer, enjoying the feeling of being up, and that's when I heard the explosion.
03. A transformer blew out, cutting electric power to a significant portion of New Aldwych, and effectively derailing my day, as I couldn't do much of anything (including get a shower with hot water). I spent the day reading some photocopied essays, I began reading a book given to me by Romulus and Iuno for Christmas, and slowly began to freeze. Around 145pm this afternoon I decided to take a walk to remind my body what cold actually felt like, and thereby maybe make the potentially unheated indoor night less traumatic. So I walked all the way out and to a park on the other side of the inlet that borders the ocean beach park I walk to in the morning sometimes. It felt like a significantly longer walk than to the ocean beach park, and eventually I got to the shore (again, on the other side of the inlet). Two swans were swimming near the beach, and the ocean was full of color (blues, greens, and purples as the waves rushed in), which surprised me given how cloudy the day was.
04. While walking back through the park, I ran into a woman with a very shy but friendly dog named Buddy. I held out my hand for him to sniff, and she said he's very shy, but after smelling me a bit I moved to pet him and he shied away (to my dismay, I think it was an outstretched hand coming down at him, which makes me think he'd been beaten - his current owner found him abandoned and took him in, but he'd been damaged before). She advised that I let him sniff my knees, and he did, after which he let me pet him. He seemed very sweet, and it breaks my heart that he was hurt before, and I'm very glad that someone found him who takes good care of him.
05. One of the essays I read today was by an anthropologist at Columbia University named Michael Taussig, who is brilliant and maybe a little crazy (he's Australian by upbringing, and that may explain some of it - I've heard him described as a gonzo anthropologist). The essay, as is typical for him, was extremely good, it's about the fact that in North and South American Native societies, the ritual experts (shamans, curers, priests, etc.) would often (and in many cases still) engage in a very interesting sort of cat-and-mouse game with each other and their clientele over whether or not their rituals (and the demonstrated effects) were "tricks" or "real." I'm not doing any of this justice, but the essay is brilliant, both for showing how skepticism and belief are not either/or states of mind but are always sort of tugging at each other, and for leaving open the problem of how or whether these rituals work (something that I think is vexed and not nearly as settled as many people would like it to be).
06. The power came back on around 545pm, and there was much rejoicing. After logging on to my computer and reading my email, I checked the weather and discovered that the forecast was simply, "Blizzard" for tonight and all day tomorrow. They're calling for up to 16 inches of snow to fall, Baskerville College closed preemptively, and the city began sending trucks around warning everyone not to park on the street so that the plows can clear things off. No snow just yet, but it seems to be coming.
07. And that's about it.
140 Days Remaining
01. So, this will be brief, but there are a few interesting things that took place today, and I wanted to jot them down before going to bed.
02. I haven't been sleeping well the past week or so; I'm unable to fall asleep until very, very late, and then have a proportionately later waking time. This is very likely at least in part due to being somewhat depressed, but it also is simply part of a vicious cycle. Last night I moved to break the cycle by going to bed at 1030pm. I was awake until about midnight, but I woke up at 8am feeling rested and ready to go. So of course I stayed in bed a bit longer, enjoying the feeling of being up, and that's when I heard the explosion.
03. A transformer blew out, cutting electric power to a significant portion of New Aldwych, and effectively derailing my day, as I couldn't do much of anything (including get a shower with hot water). I spent the day reading some photocopied essays, I began reading a book given to me by Romulus and Iuno for Christmas, and slowly began to freeze. Around 145pm this afternoon I decided to take a walk to remind my body what cold actually felt like, and thereby maybe make the potentially unheated indoor night less traumatic. So I walked all the way out and to a park on the other side of the inlet that borders the ocean beach park I walk to in the morning sometimes. It felt like a significantly longer walk than to the ocean beach park, and eventually I got to the shore (again, on the other side of the inlet). Two swans were swimming near the beach, and the ocean was full of color (blues, greens, and purples as the waves rushed in), which surprised me given how cloudy the day was.
04. While walking back through the park, I ran into a woman with a very shy but friendly dog named Buddy. I held out my hand for him to sniff, and she said he's very shy, but after smelling me a bit I moved to pet him and he shied away (to my dismay, I think it was an outstretched hand coming down at him, which makes me think he'd been beaten - his current owner found him abandoned and took him in, but he'd been damaged before). She advised that I let him sniff my knees, and he did, after which he let me pet him. He seemed very sweet, and it breaks my heart that he was hurt before, and I'm very glad that someone found him who takes good care of him.
05. One of the essays I read today was by an anthropologist at Columbia University named Michael Taussig, who is brilliant and maybe a little crazy (he's Australian by upbringing, and that may explain some of it - I've heard him described as a gonzo anthropologist). The essay, as is typical for him, was extremely good, it's about the fact that in North and South American Native societies, the ritual experts (shamans, curers, priests, etc.) would often (and in many cases still) engage in a very interesting sort of cat-and-mouse game with each other and their clientele over whether or not their rituals (and the demonstrated effects) were "tricks" or "real." I'm not doing any of this justice, but the essay is brilliant, both for showing how skepticism and belief are not either/or states of mind but are always sort of tugging at each other, and for leaving open the problem of how or whether these rituals work (something that I think is vexed and not nearly as settled as many people would like it to be).
06. The power came back on around 545pm, and there was much rejoicing. After logging on to my computer and reading my email, I checked the weather and discovered that the forecast was simply, "Blizzard" for tonight and all day tomorrow. They're calling for up to 16 inches of snow to fall, Baskerville College closed preemptively, and the city began sending trucks around warning everyone not to park on the street so that the plows can clear things off. No snow just yet, but it seems to be coming.
07. And that's about it.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Grim Musings
2011.01.09
142 Days Remaining
01. It snowed throughout the day yesterday, and on into the night. Not a lot of accumulation for all of that, but I enjoyed sitting here last night with all interior lights off and the blinds open on my glass doors, watching the snowfall in the complex's exterior lights' glow. It's windy out today, and the snow was very fine so the various gusts send cascades of infinitesimal bits of snow across my line of sight. Because there are so many I can actually see the patterns of the air's movement. Sometimes I look out the window and have a clear view of the street, and the trees and buildings across it. Other times, I turn around and my view is of the same scene through billows of thousands of white grains of fallen snow.
02.01. In light of the snowfall, and the only recent ending of the 12 Days of Christmas, last night I watched (via Hulu.com) a previously-unknown-to-me film Santa and Pete. It stars James Earl Jones (as the modern time narrator) and Hume Cronyn as Santa Claus. The film was poorly written, poorly acted, and overall silly. But, that said, it was an alleged history of Santa Claus and Black Peter (the dutch companion of Sinterklaas) and their voyage from Holland to the New World. I won't go into the historical problems of it, but the sentiment was sweet (one of the very heavy-handed themes was interracial companionship and harmony) and there were moments when the visuals were really eye-catching.
02.02. On the further, but important to note, downside, the character of Pete had very uncomfortable elements which made me think of American minstrel shows as they've become integrated into the idea of the "good black person" in American popular culture (he's subordinate to a white person, but lovingly so, he's vaguely comical, he's focused on bodily concerns, etc.). This was perhaps even more strongly at the forefront of my mind because the traditional figure on which the movie was drawing, the Dutch Zwarte Piet has become a recurring source of controversy in Holland, as he is represented each Christmas by white people (usually teenage girls, interestingly) in blackface. So the film, where Pete was represented by an adult African American man, was clearly diverging from traditional depictions, but the characterization still reaffirmed (I think) many of the coded racial messages that are part of the Dutch custom (btw, interestingly, this version of Zwarte Piet is actually only first attested in sources in the 19th century, and so most of the narratives I've heard about its origins are wrong - not based upon resistance to Spanish imperialism, etc., though it was designed to reference earlier times).
02.03. It got me thinking, once more, about the history of Santa Claus and the ways that this is very rarely presented well or accurately. This led to some poking about on WWW and in various academic databases, and one of the more interesting discoveries was that St. Charles, Missouri has a very complicated Christmas festival each year, which might be fun to go to someday: http://www.stcharleschristmas.com/index.html.
03. There hasn't been much going on here the past few days. I have been remiss in noting here that my telephonic disarray continues. Upon arriving back up here last weekend I discovered that the cell phone loaned to me by Iuno and Romulus is also incompatible with my SIM card (which I had left in New Aldwych when I came to Delaware for the holidays, because I wasn't being careful). In fact, from what I can see, I'm going to have to buy an old phone off of eBay to replace the one that broke, because I've apparently missed several generations of phone technology over the past three years, and so my cell phone (which remains on my ex-wife's account because it would cost $200 to sever the contract before this coming July) is out-of-date. Specifically, it's SIM card. Sigh. I'm able to make calls using Gmail's phone function, but I can't receive any. If you need to call me, please send me an email with a time you want to be called, and I can call you. The incoming call will say it's from Escondido, CA (which is where I'm not, btw).
04. I recently asked my upcoming Supernatural students about whether they'd like to try out a ghost-hunting experiment on campus, and as the vacation-laden responses have trickled in, one of them has a brother who is best friends with one of the newer Ghost Hunters (from the TV show). So she's going to see if he can arrange some way for me to talk with them, since they do not respond to any email I've sent (and, in fact, don't like talking to academics in general).
05. This next bit is excerpted from an email I sent to Silvanus earlier today, and is complicated enough that for my own sake I'm breaking it up into sections as I revise it. Basically I've seen postings from both Democrats and Tea Partiers that share the assumption that Loughner's attack on Congresswoman Giffords (and assorted bystanders) in AZ were related (or relate-able) to his politics. I've seen responses to those postings arguing that it's absurd to link Loughner's politics and actions, and that any such linking is politically motivated.
06. In attempting to not fall into the either/or perspective, I've turned to historical analysis, and am proceeding by framing this particular event in terms of the Oklahoma City Bombing, the Order (who did a bunch of very bad things in 1983), the Weather Underground, Sacco and Vanzetti, etc. That is, structural comparison with other small group (or individual) actors who act violently towards political and media figures indicates that those actors tend to orient themselves towards the margins of dominant political discourse, but that those margins may be either on the left or the right.
07. Conversely, those margins are most likely to employ not simply violent rhetoric ("we're in it to win it" "this is a struggle for our country's soul" etc) but also, in various ways, to advocate for actual violence, even if they do so only haphazardly. I remember seeing Ted Nugent (whom I like, btw, but often disagree with) remark that if Obama won in 2008, the government would present itself as a "target-rich environment" - this said while holding an assault rifle. Or the various "2nd Amendment solutions" comments voiced by Sharron Angle, etc. come to mind. What I'd like to know is quantifiable data about the amount of threats of physical violence directed towards Democrats since the Tea Party began (and, really, since Obama was elected); I have heard that the Secret Service has had a massive upsurge in credible threats against the President than in previous administrations, and I have heard more about violence directed towards Democratic representatives and senators, but I don't know if that is numerically accurate or impressionistic.
08. On the third hand, I have heard Tea Party leaders saying "of course this is all metaphor" and, using the principle of charity where I accuse someone of lying only when I have good reason to do so, I'll accept that they believed that. As Jack Schafer on Slate.com has pointed out, the vast majority of folks who get mad at the government don't physically attack other people. And yet...most racists in the post-bellum South didn't participate in lynchings, but they stood by and even rhetorically supported that violence, so that when it occurred they weren't protesting. Let me state here that I'm a Free Speech Absolutist: barring the "fire in crowded theaters" and "using known falsehood to materially attack someone" exceptions, I think one can say as much racist, sexist, age-ist, bigoted nastiness as one wants. But I think that it's disingenuous to plead "first amendment" as a way to avoid talking about whether certain speech climates make certain physical actions more or less likely.
09. So I'm left with an interesting interpretive problem: historical comparison suggests that we should not be surprised that Loughner had extremist political views, but I don't know that evidence suggests those views were particularly causative in his murder of six people and injury of others. On the other hand, that does not mean that there isn't a causative dynamic going on, we simply don't have enough evidence to prove it. And, god willing, we never will, because the only way I could see such evidence coming to light would be other assassination attempts by people with similar political views to his. And I'd prefer that not happen.
10. Those are my thoughts for now. Oh, and on an incongruously not-grim note, happy birthday to my sister Agrippina, who turned 33 today.
142 Days Remaining
01. It snowed throughout the day yesterday, and on into the night. Not a lot of accumulation for all of that, but I enjoyed sitting here last night with all interior lights off and the blinds open on my glass doors, watching the snowfall in the complex's exterior lights' glow. It's windy out today, and the snow was very fine so the various gusts send cascades of infinitesimal bits of snow across my line of sight. Because there are so many I can actually see the patterns of the air's movement. Sometimes I look out the window and have a clear view of the street, and the trees and buildings across it. Other times, I turn around and my view is of the same scene through billows of thousands of white grains of fallen snow.
02.01. In light of the snowfall, and the only recent ending of the 12 Days of Christmas, last night I watched (via Hulu.com) a previously-unknown-to-me film Santa and Pete. It stars James Earl Jones (as the modern time narrator) and Hume Cronyn as Santa Claus. The film was poorly written, poorly acted, and overall silly. But, that said, it was an alleged history of Santa Claus and Black Peter (the dutch companion of Sinterklaas) and their voyage from Holland to the New World. I won't go into the historical problems of it, but the sentiment was sweet (one of the very heavy-handed themes was interracial companionship and harmony) and there were moments when the visuals were really eye-catching.
02.02. On the further, but important to note, downside, the character of Pete had very uncomfortable elements which made me think of American minstrel shows as they've become integrated into the idea of the "good black person" in American popular culture (he's subordinate to a white person, but lovingly so, he's vaguely comical, he's focused on bodily concerns, etc.). This was perhaps even more strongly at the forefront of my mind because the traditional figure on which the movie was drawing, the Dutch Zwarte Piet has become a recurring source of controversy in Holland, as he is represented each Christmas by white people (usually teenage girls, interestingly) in blackface. So the film, where Pete was represented by an adult African American man, was clearly diverging from traditional depictions, but the characterization still reaffirmed (I think) many of the coded racial messages that are part of the Dutch custom (btw, interestingly, this version of Zwarte Piet is actually only first attested in sources in the 19th century, and so most of the narratives I've heard about its origins are wrong - not based upon resistance to Spanish imperialism, etc., though it was designed to reference earlier times).
02.03. It got me thinking, once more, about the history of Santa Claus and the ways that this is very rarely presented well or accurately. This led to some poking about on WWW and in various academic databases, and one of the more interesting discoveries was that St. Charles, Missouri has a very complicated Christmas festival each year, which might be fun to go to someday: http://www.stcharleschristmas.com/index.html.
03. There hasn't been much going on here the past few days. I have been remiss in noting here that my telephonic disarray continues. Upon arriving back up here last weekend I discovered that the cell phone loaned to me by Iuno and Romulus is also incompatible with my SIM card (which I had left in New Aldwych when I came to Delaware for the holidays, because I wasn't being careful). In fact, from what I can see, I'm going to have to buy an old phone off of eBay to replace the one that broke, because I've apparently missed several generations of phone technology over the past three years, and so my cell phone (which remains on my ex-wife's account because it would cost $200 to sever the contract before this coming July) is out-of-date. Specifically, it's SIM card. Sigh. I'm able to make calls using Gmail's phone function, but I can't receive any. If you need to call me, please send me an email with a time you want to be called, and I can call you. The incoming call will say it's from Escondido, CA (which is where I'm not, btw).
04. I recently asked my upcoming Supernatural students about whether they'd like to try out a ghost-hunting experiment on campus, and as the vacation-laden responses have trickled in, one of them has a brother who is best friends with one of the newer Ghost Hunters (from the TV show). So she's going to see if he can arrange some way for me to talk with them, since they do not respond to any email I've sent (and, in fact, don't like talking to academics in general).
05. This next bit is excerpted from an email I sent to Silvanus earlier today, and is complicated enough that for my own sake I'm breaking it up into sections as I revise it. Basically I've seen postings from both Democrats and Tea Partiers that share the assumption that Loughner's attack on Congresswoman Giffords (and assorted bystanders) in AZ were related (or relate-able) to his politics. I've seen responses to those postings arguing that it's absurd to link Loughner's politics and actions, and that any such linking is politically motivated.
06. In attempting to not fall into the either/or perspective, I've turned to historical analysis, and am proceeding by framing this particular event in terms of the Oklahoma City Bombing, the Order (who did a bunch of very bad things in 1983), the Weather Underground, Sacco and Vanzetti, etc. That is, structural comparison with other small group (or individual) actors who act violently towards political and media figures indicates that those actors tend to orient themselves towards the margins of dominant political discourse, but that those margins may be either on the left or the right.
07. Conversely, those margins are most likely to employ not simply violent rhetoric ("we're in it to win it" "this is a struggle for our country's soul" etc) but also, in various ways, to advocate for actual violence, even if they do so only haphazardly. I remember seeing Ted Nugent (whom I like, btw, but often disagree with) remark that if Obama won in 2008, the government would present itself as a "target-rich environment" - this said while holding an assault rifle. Or the various "2nd Amendment solutions" comments voiced by Sharron Angle, etc. come to mind. What I'd like to know is quantifiable data about the amount of threats of physical violence directed towards Democrats since the Tea Party began (and, really, since Obama was elected); I have heard that the Secret Service has had a massive upsurge in credible threats against the President than in previous administrations, and I have heard more about violence directed towards Democratic representatives and senators, but I don't know if that is numerically accurate or impressionistic.
08. On the third hand, I have heard Tea Party leaders saying "of course this is all metaphor" and, using the principle of charity where I accuse someone of lying only when I have good reason to do so, I'll accept that they believed that. As Jack Schafer on Slate.com has pointed out, the vast majority of folks who get mad at the government don't physically attack other people. And yet...most racists in the post-bellum South didn't participate in lynchings, but they stood by and even rhetorically supported that violence, so that when it occurred they weren't protesting. Let me state here that I'm a Free Speech Absolutist: barring the "fire in crowded theaters" and "using known falsehood to materially attack someone" exceptions, I think one can say as much racist, sexist, age-ist, bigoted nastiness as one wants. But I think that it's disingenuous to plead "first amendment" as a way to avoid talking about whether certain speech climates make certain physical actions more or less likely.
09. So I'm left with an interesting interpretive problem: historical comparison suggests that we should not be surprised that Loughner had extremist political views, but I don't know that evidence suggests those views were particularly causative in his murder of six people and injury of others. On the other hand, that does not mean that there isn't a causative dynamic going on, we simply don't have enough evidence to prove it. And, god willing, we never will, because the only way I could see such evidence coming to light would be other assassination attempts by people with similar political views to his. And I'd prefer that not happen.
10. Those are my thoughts for now. Oh, and on an incongruously not-grim note, happy birthday to my sister Agrippina, who turned 33 today.
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