Hudsucker and Telemacher

2011.01.05
146 Days Remaining

01. I have been working at my desk all night (well, intermixed with watching stuff on Netflix), and eventually turned on iTunes and put it on "shuffle." Eh, I like the music I like, and so I've been singing along merrily (how merrily? fairly merrily, I think). Then a song came on, "A Boat Like Gideon Brown" by Great Big Sea, which made me pause. This is one of my ex-wife's favorite songs, and Great Big Sea is one of her favorite bands (to which he introduced me when we were...I guess you could say "courting" via email. It's a good song, very sweet (it's about a father and son, both fishermen in Newfoundland, who are saving up their money to buy the eponymous boat), and one of my favorites as well. Still...it's the little things some days.

02. I was speaking with Belisarius via gmail-chat yesterday and commenting on the problem of loneliness up here. It's very easy to see no one for several days in a row, and to feel not just lonely but isolated. I'm going to campus tomorrow, for most of the day, to do work there but also just to be around people. While there are many types of loneliness, and I felt some others when married, one thing I rarely felt was completely isolated, even if living with my house-mate was often very difficult. As Belisarius and I discussed, one of the real benefits of moving to Wilmington in May will simply be having a social group available, even if on any given day (or sequence of days) I don't see anyone. Here, not having a social group isn't an option, it's just the way things are.

03. I spoke on the telephone this evening with the husband of one of Selena's former co-workers. He is a religion teacher at Wilmington Friends school, and is retiring at the end of this year. My hope was that this would translate into that school being on the lookout for a replacement, but after our conversation (he is very nice and encouraging, and was very helpful) that school seems unlikely. They are following suit with many schools right now, trying to save money by cutting down on electives and any positions that can be combined are being combined. On the other hand, he said I should send my resume and a letter, just in case, and as Selena pointed out, maybe my qualifications will just blow their minds. He also gave me a list of Friends schools in the Delaware Valley that have stronger (and more secure) Religion programs, and so I'll be contacting them in the next week or so. It would be wonderful if I could continue teaching.

04. Lavinia (for those of you who might be keeping track, Lavinia's husband is currently serving in the Navy in Djibouti, has degrees in Marine Science, a little boy, went to college with Octavius and me, and lives in Newark now - if you still don't know who she is, you probably wouldn't even if I used her real name) and her husband had looked into applying to start a Charter School next year, but had to put that plan on hold due to his deployment. I remain, on some level, ambivalent about Charter Schools because on one hand I see them as removing funding from traditional public education (of which I'm a big fan), and their overall success rates are about the same as public schools (which is to say that they vary wildly; though in Charter Schools' case without any clear patterns or discernible causation beyond any particular school). On the other hand, I grant that many people are frustrated with the state of public education in our country (though I sometimes think that's because we don't really understand the data available to us), and I'm all in favor of experimental schools where different educational strategies are tested and worked out. In fact, over the years (going back at least 6 if not 7 now) I've had an occasional, ongoing, conversation with several of you about what a good school would be, and there's a part of me that would really like to go about designing a school from the ground up.

05. A few years ago I watched the Coen Bros' film The Hudsucker Proxy, the plot of which is too complicated for me to summarize here. The climax of the film occurs when Tim Robbins' character (the aforementioned proxy), having reached a comprehensive nadir in his fortunes, attempts to commit suicide by jumping out of a window (through which another character played by Charles Durning had previously committed suicide - it's a dark comedy). As Robbins' character plunges toward the street below, his fall is arrested mysteriously, and he is approached by the (cognitively disjunctive to see) ghost of Charles Durning, dressed as an angel. Through exposition and backstory unimportant here, deceased-Durning offers Robbins (and the film does a much better job of building up the dramatic tension, as Robbins' character hangs in mid-air, "a second chance" (and some perspective). In my favorite movie, Steve Martin's L.A. Story (funny, but not a comedy in any straightforward way - this is where we start to see Martin's non-comedic artistic self shine, I think), his character, Harris K. Telemacher, is assisted in making right his life by a Freeway Sign (which may or may not be speaking for the entire city of L.A.). At the end of that film, Martin's voice over says, "A kiss may not be the truth, but it is what we wish were true."

06. I've been thinking about those two films off and on for the past few days. I am often cynical, and can be very pessimistic (or at least not hopeful), and I realize that this is often a shield because it is easy to feel wounded and defeated. I try, very hard, not to lose my affection for the world and the people in it, and even when they infuriate me or sadden me, to remember that they are also deserving of love, and that we all make mistakes. I suppose what I find compelling in those films is the externalization and making-visible the hope that we all have, or at least that I know I have and which I suspect we all have at one point or another, for a second chance. To the best of my knowledge, most of us aren't visited by Charles Durning's angel, nor are we spoken to by street signs, but I think that many of us desperately, on one level or another, want there to be someone watching out for us in the big sense, someone who can do what none of our friends or other human beings can normally do: give us the chance to make right what has gone wrong and begin again, clean and bright at the morning.

07. Charles Durning's angel tells Tim Robbins' character that despair looks backward, paying attention to what can't be changed. But I sometimes think that despair is what you feel when the past refuses to stay past, and extends into your present and your future, so that you don't feel like you have a future, just a past always enfolding you.

08. Today I wrote to my Supernatural class's students asking them about scheduling a weekly viewing time for the films they'll need to watch, and if there were any of them interested in trying to do a "ghost hunting" experiment in one of campus' haunted buildings (probably the big dining hall where there have been multiple unrelated eyewitness reports, since its construction several years ago, of a young girl who stands near the ice cream machine but who vanishes if you get to close to her - the hall is built on what used to be a neighborhood, so who knows the history of that spot?). I've only had 3 replies thus far (out of 30 students), but it's vacation, so I'm not expecting a wave of responses. Still, the three were all very positive about the class in general (very anticipatory), and that made me feel good. I'd like to go out with a bang when I leave Baskerville College, and this seems like a good class in which to do so.

09. Selena's blog posting today told how, when trying to get Euander to admit to having written on one of Iunia's pictures, Selena said that she was going to have to watch what had happened in her camera (which of course we all know wasn't on). Apparently, the idea of having been observed all this time by the camera got both the kids to confess to pretty much everything they've ever done wrong (my favorite? Iunia confessed to having hidden, and later eaten, some mints that she got one time at the Olive Garden). All I could hear in my head as I read this was Chunk from Goonies, confessing his life's crimes to the Fratellis: "but the worst thing I ever done..."

10. One last note before bed: L.A. Story has one of the best love scenes I've ever encountered, where Steve Martin's and Victoria Tenant's characters are walking down Melrose in LA and go into some sort of botanical garden. The moment they enter the actual garden Enya's song "On Your Shore" (Enya's album Watermark is lovely and dear to me) begins playing, and the two of them are basically in Some Other Place for the remainder of the scene, which only goes on for another 50 seconds or so, but captures...JRR Tolkien would recognize it. They're in the Perilous Realm, at least for those 50 seconds, where statues move, and the wind loves you, and plants grow in your footsteps as you walk, because life begets life.

11. Maybe someday I'll write about why I love Watermark, and why the statues in that scene in LA Story give me chills.