2010.11.01
Days Remaining: 210
1. So I've been profoundly unproductive, blog-wise, for the past 3 weeks. Some of this has been due to getting very, very busy, especially with grading (3 classes in full swing can lead to a massive influx of essays each week). In the midst of all of that I had a trip to Delaware, and then following that I had a very difficult (not a plea for sympathy, btw, just reporting what was going on) run of days centered around the 21st of October, which was the 4th anniversary of my wedding. It was also the day when my ex-wife returned my wedding ring (it arrived that day, I didn't pick it up until Monday 25 October). This combination kind of sucked my energy down quite a bit, and on Tuesday I dove back into working and grading. So the last week or so was exhausted, and the ones preceding just busy.
2. Before going any further, a birthday shout out to Octavius (30 October) and Belisarius (01 November). Both are now 35; we three were all born within 6.5 weeks of one another (Octavius eldest, me youngest), and so Mischief Night every year is the day when I actually begin to feel like I'm growing older. I've never been particularly concerned about aging; I know people who are majorly concerned about it, but I've had trouble keeping track of my own age (I often, if asked without preparation, am off by a year or two) for years now. I had gray hair when I was 10, apparently from stress as it faded as I lived past the aftermaths of the divorce, but my paternal uncle had gray hair in high school, and so I had an expectation that I would go gray early. In fact, I didn't. My beard now has two distinct white-ish areas that, because in this at least I'm lucky, are developing into two parallel bars from the corners of my mouth downwards to my chin, framing a still-dark center stripe. They are roughly symmetrical, approximately the same size, and their only downside is that during my recent visit to Delaware, my beloved niece, Iunia, informed me that I should "make the white hairs brown." Sigh. I shall remain firm, though, in resisting her order. I don't mind aging. It's natural.
3. Speaking of my niece brings to mind my nephew, Euander, who won the AC Moore costume contest on Saturday past, in his guise as "Dancy" (his choice of names) the Robot. Congratulations, kiddo!
4. It's growing colder here, we had unseasonably warm days at the beginning of last week, but around Thursday the nighttime temperatures began dropping into the 50s, and then by Saturday night into the 40s. I still leave my tiny window open all day to keep fresh air coming in, but haven't opened the sliding glass doors in days. This temperature shift was caused by a massive cold front that blew through, and led to an enormous amount of wind the past few days. I actually thought, twice, that someone in my building had a major plumbing disaster because of the sudden onset of what sounded, to me, like rushing water. It was, in fact, enormously powerful and sustained winds blowing through the trees near my building. I mention the weather so frequently in these posts because I am confined, when working, to an interior lifestyle, and thus think a lot about the world outside. I'm not just including filler.
5. Over the past week or so I was invited to give 3 talks on campus (2 in dorms and 1 to a local public school students mentoring group) on "Scary Stories." This has grown out of my "Supernatural in American Popular Culture" course (offered last Autumn and again this upcoming Spring), and I do my best to not only tell "true" scary stories but to inject some critical thinking on the subject into the presentation. The stories are all "true" insofar as I focus as much as possible on firsthand accounts of personal experiences with ghosts, night hags, house spirits, and so on. I warn the students that I cannot personally vouch for the meaning or proper interpretation of any of the events I narrate, and we discuss some of the options that are available. What I love about this each year is the way in which stories I tell almost always trigger responses from my audiences, who begin raising their hands and saying things like, "One time I was in my cousin's house..." It's also fun to actually scare some folks (last year one of my students ended up needing to be walked back to her room, in the same dorm, because she didn't want to be alone - she didn't even need to go outside); this year I had in two different sessions people curling up in each others' laps and one person actually yelled out loud when I got to the conclusion. I firmly believe that Halloween should involve an element of eeriness, which one can turn into either fear or exhilaration (preferably oscillating between the two). I gave the 3rd talk last night, and so I got to see what Halloween looks like on Baskerville College's campus. Basically, it was dark and pretty quiet. Granted, it was a Sunday evening, but I was still expecting more going on. Another bonus: I heard about ghostlore on campus, one story from which actually said that one my classrooms this semester is haunted, and that my office building is haunted as well. Creepiest story I heard? Apparently a long-standing patron of the college's theater department attended plays in the campus theater (was seen by multiple witnesses and spoke with several people) for up to 6 months after she died. Her various interlocutors didn't know that she was dead, and apparently neither did she.
6. In case anyone is following after the long lacuna, I did read the Story Waiting To Pierce You about which I wrote in my last post, and once again was struck by the combination of acute analytical intelligence and totally self-serving, answer-predetermined, argument. Because Kingsley is very smart, I was on guard reading the book, and had to parse out as I was doing so why certain logical progressions were defensible and others were not. It takes a great deal of energy to do this with his books, and it's one of the few times where being widely-read and familiar with a range of texts is almost a necessity for dealing responsibly with a single text. His arguments and evidence were all over the map, sometimes justly, and sometimes less so, and so I couldn't simply dismiss things about which I was skeptical, or accept things that I thought sounded good. I had to prove/defend every critical response I had. Still, it was elegantly written and the stuff worth taking away from it was really worth taking away.
7. On the topic of books, the author of one of my favorite books of all time (Ceremony), Leslie Marmon Silko, has just released a memoir, The Turquoise Ledge, her first book in over 10 years. I am sometimes guilty of a typical tendency in mainstream American culture to romanticize the Southwest. Why that area in particular strikes so many people as being distinctively spiritual, interesting, and even seductive is unclear to me, but somehow the deserts and mountains of New Mexico often fit into New Age speculations, back-to-the-land movements, and certain type of hipster aesthetics. Given that I've only driven through the area once, when en route to California with my family in 1993, and we were really in Colorado, not New Mexico, my abstract affection for it really must be a combination of cultural knowledge (things we all "know" about the Southwest) and what I've read, specifically the novel Ceremony and several short stories by Leslie Marmon Silko. I think that one of the biggest draws for me is how pervasively hybrid the cultures there are: Spanish, Anglo, Native American (of various sorts), African American sources are all present and overlapping, and rather than blending seamlessly they sort of co-exist in a complicated cultural stew (not so much a melting pot). All of that takes place against a backdrop of clear light and achingly beautiful landscapes (plus coyotes!), and I am, at least, intrigued. Anyway, Silko's memoir is apparently a mix of family histories, nature observations, and religious autobiography, and I cannot wait to read it.
8. I'm also excited by the release of a very neat album by Jordi Savall and the Tembembe Ensemble Continuo titled El Nuevo Mundo, which consists of songs from the time of Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica, and works to show the ways that this led to the creolization of Spanish music by incorporating Mesoamerican and African elements into Spanish music, and Spanish and African elements into Mesoamerican music. The best part is that it costs $24.98 on Amazon.com and $9.99 on iTunes. I heard a review of it on NPR last week, and was really impressed. I'm not a huge fan of classical music, at least not enough to put the time and effort into having a strong intellectual grasp of it, but I know what I like. In two weeks I get paid, and I'll have a new book and a new album.
9. Moving on from my gross consumerism, something else has been on my mind quite a bit lately. After the rash of nationally-reported suicides by LGBTQ teens last month, the LGBTQ Center at Baskerville College sponsored a "Teach-In" about LGBTQ issues both on campus and in general. I was personally invited by two of my students who were presenting, so of course I went. The event was interesting, to say the least, and extremely well attended (it was standing room only in the back). One element that I found particularly interesting and even a bit troubling was that many of the presenters expressed a strong dislike (to the point of rejection) of the word/concept "tolerance" or "toleration." This was developed in various presentations as a critique of the inadequacy of tolerance (since one tolerates what one does not like or finds offensive) and an argument that we should be aiming towards "embracing." One presenter articulated this by saying that parents of LGBTQ kids "should love their kids because their kids are LGBTQ." So here is where I become troubled: I would have said, "love them because they're your kids." I can imagine laws that prevent (or regulate) intolerant behavior (exclusion, bullying, etc.) but I don't know how one can possibly actively coerce people into being accepting. The race-focused Civil Rights act makes this clear (though obviously there are a host of specific factors that differentiate the two situations): we can police racism, but we can't stop people from being prejudiced. I was struck, at this teach-in, by the question of whether or not tolerance and the development of supporting community structures in addition to the existing biased community structures would be adequate, or whether we need to do something far more penetrating to properly assist our LGBTQ citizens. But if it's the latter, I have no idea how to do it in a focused purposive way. I'm also uncomfortable telling people that they are "wrong" to be homophobic. I can argue with specific homophobic claims (about marriage, adoption, military service, safe sex, etc.), I even feel comfortable speculating about the historic and cultural roots of pervasive homophobia, but to me the best we can do at a macro level is address this through anti-discrimination laws and the egalitarian enforcement of the Bill of Rights (equal protection, etc.). I don't know how to make people less homophobic. I do know how to make sure that they cannot manifest their homophobia in explicit/direct fashion. I can't make people like this situation, though. And I'm not sure that I would have the right to do so, even if I knew how to do it. Like I said, I can bring suit against someone for discriminating against a racial or gender minority and thereby violating federal law. But I don't know how to bring suit against someone because they believe, in their own heads, that African Americans or Women or any group are somehow inferior. I will argue with them vociferously on this, but that's not coercive, it's attempting (usually unsuccessfully) to be persuasive. Hrm.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Dia de los Muertos
Friday, October 8, 2010
Sunlight and Breezes
2010.10.08
Days Remaining: 234
1. Though we had nothing so severe as the rains and flooding in my home state of Delaware, the weather in my current neck of the woods has been gray and overcast, with intermittent showers and downpours, for over a week. That is, until last night, when the clouds began to break. This morning dawned clear and bright, and there are strong, though gentle, breezes. This is one of my favorite types of weather, and in good time, too. I've got my one tiny window and my sliding glass door wide open with the fan on my AC wall unit blowing in, and my little floor fan blowing out. My apartment had been feeling very close, air-wise, and smelled kind of stale (its size and lack of windows on more than one wall means that air does not circulate much at all). So now it's as wide-open as I can make it, and the difference is noticeable, both in terms of ambient feel and underlying, almost sub-conscious, scent. Much better!
2. I went back to Providence yesterday to retrieve the divorce documents and mail them to the sheriff who will serve them to my ex-wife. Once again, the lack of clear instruction struck: I had prepared stamped envelopes for mailing the documents based upon what I was told, but then discovered that the "successfully served" form is to be mailed back to me, not the RI family court, which meant I had to go find a new envelope, go to the Post Office (as opposed to using the mail box directly next to the court building), and mail it from there. This is not a problem, as such, but annoying because it's not what I was first told. On top of that, when I arrived to get the forms, they had been misfiled and a clerk had to dig through a pile of cases to find mine. It took her 10 minutes, but now the whole thing is as done as I can make it. The actual court proceedings are scheduled, because Murphy rules all, at 9am the morning after my birthday. At least this means that the process should be finished by New Years.
3. For the past few weeks I've been corresponding with my friend, Silvanus, a professor of ancient history, about a sort-of academic author whose work we have both been reading over the years. This author is a trained classicist who wrote several excellent books on ancient Greek philosophy, but who has clearly moved onto a new phase of his expertise, becoming a mystical actualization guru. This development is all the more intriguing because he remains a classicist and uses ancient texts as part of his overall programme, lecturing on Parmenides and Empedokles. Anyway, his next book is on Pythagoras, and I'm bemusedly and eagerly awaiting its arrival. The thing with this author, Peter Kingsley, is that he is both 1) brilliant, and 2) a non-academic advocate. So his books are a profoundly entangled mix of acutely argued scholarship and religious fervor that goes beyond what I call analysis (or, rather, he becomes someone who a scholar of religion would study, rather than a scholar of religion himself). So reading them is challenging, enjoyable, and frustrating all at once, as I try to tease out what is of value to me in his work, and what is of value only to his disciples. This is an interesting problem that one finds more frequently in the work of scholars who identify with a living religious tradition (like reading Cardinal, now Saint, John Henry Newman - both brilliant and a hardcore Catholic, which impacts his analytical work and conclusions), so it's fascinating to experience it with texts from long-gone cultures like the ancient Greeks. If you're interested in seeing how this interplay works out in practice, just look at his website's listing for the book: http://www.peterkingsley.org/Details.cfm?ProdID=60&category=2 The various supporting blurbs are written by a mix of academic classicists, self-help gurus, and alternative-track medical doctors.
4. I'm also very excited by another book that has just come out, though I haven't been able to get a copy of it yet either, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy And Identity In Indian Intellectual History (you can see it on Google books if you're interested). I've taught Hindu Traditions in two different places, and one of my most important teachers, at Syracuse, was an anthropologist who specialized in Indian religions. I've also used Indian materials as comparanda for my own work, and try to keep tabs on interesting new work in the field. This book is striking because one of the major disputes in the study of Hinduism is whether there was ever a unified tradition that can be called "Hinduism" before the period of the British Raj, when British administrators and scholars began using the term to mean all non-Buddhist, non-Jain, non-Sikh, non-Muslim Indians. Some have said this means that there is no underlying unity or meaningful coherence to "Hinduism" before the 18th century, and others say that this is silly, of course there was, there just wasn't a need for a single term before then. I'm actually more of the first camp with the reservation that "meaningful" is a tricky word, and that it's more interesting to see how people on or near the subcontinent interacted with each other and their historical antecedents, including when and how they choose to adopt or give distinguishing corporate names to themselves and others (i.e, when do I start saying that "they" are Xists, and I'm Yist?). This new book is about one of the major pre-colonial attempts to formulate a sense of Hindu-ness, by Indian philosophers, and the previews online make it look very interesting. So I've got two books to which I'm really looking forward to reading.
5. Belated acknowledgment: Happy Birthday to my friends Livia (Monday) and Romulus* (Wednesday)!
* Romulus' name may have to change, as I need to check something but don't have the necessary information to hand at the moment.
Days Remaining: 234
1. Though we had nothing so severe as the rains and flooding in my home state of Delaware, the weather in my current neck of the woods has been gray and overcast, with intermittent showers and downpours, for over a week. That is, until last night, when the clouds began to break. This morning dawned clear and bright, and there are strong, though gentle, breezes. This is one of my favorite types of weather, and in good time, too. I've got my one tiny window and my sliding glass door wide open with the fan on my AC wall unit blowing in, and my little floor fan blowing out. My apartment had been feeling very close, air-wise, and smelled kind of stale (its size and lack of windows on more than one wall means that air does not circulate much at all). So now it's as wide-open as I can make it, and the difference is noticeable, both in terms of ambient feel and underlying, almost sub-conscious, scent. Much better!
2. I went back to Providence yesterday to retrieve the divorce documents and mail them to the sheriff who will serve them to my ex-wife. Once again, the lack of clear instruction struck: I had prepared stamped envelopes for mailing the documents based upon what I was told, but then discovered that the "successfully served" form is to be mailed back to me, not the RI family court, which meant I had to go find a new envelope, go to the Post Office (as opposed to using the mail box directly next to the court building), and mail it from there. This is not a problem, as such, but annoying because it's not what I was first told. On top of that, when I arrived to get the forms, they had been misfiled and a clerk had to dig through a pile of cases to find mine. It took her 10 minutes, but now the whole thing is as done as I can make it. The actual court proceedings are scheduled, because Murphy rules all, at 9am the morning after my birthday. At least this means that the process should be finished by New Years.
3. For the past few weeks I've been corresponding with my friend, Silvanus, a professor of ancient history, about a sort-of academic author whose work we have both been reading over the years. This author is a trained classicist who wrote several excellent books on ancient Greek philosophy, but who has clearly moved onto a new phase of his expertise, becoming a mystical actualization guru. This development is all the more intriguing because he remains a classicist and uses ancient texts as part of his overall programme, lecturing on Parmenides and Empedokles. Anyway, his next book is on Pythagoras, and I'm bemusedly and eagerly awaiting its arrival. The thing with this author, Peter Kingsley, is that he is both 1) brilliant, and 2) a non-academic advocate. So his books are a profoundly entangled mix of acutely argued scholarship and religious fervor that goes beyond what I call analysis (or, rather, he becomes someone who a scholar of religion would study, rather than a scholar of religion himself). So reading them is challenging, enjoyable, and frustrating all at once, as I try to tease out what is of value to me in his work, and what is of value only to his disciples. This is an interesting problem that one finds more frequently in the work of scholars who identify with a living religious tradition (like reading Cardinal, now Saint, John Henry Newman - both brilliant and a hardcore Catholic, which impacts his analytical work and conclusions), so it's fascinating to experience it with texts from long-gone cultures like the ancient Greeks. If you're interested in seeing how this interplay works out in practice, just look at his website's listing for the book: http://www.peterkingsley.org/Details.cfm?ProdID=60&category=2 The various supporting blurbs are written by a mix of academic classicists, self-help gurus, and alternative-track medical doctors.
4. I'm also very excited by another book that has just come out, though I haven't been able to get a copy of it yet either, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy And Identity In Indian Intellectual History (you can see it on Google books if you're interested). I've taught Hindu Traditions in two different places, and one of my most important teachers, at Syracuse, was an anthropologist who specialized in Indian religions. I've also used Indian materials as comparanda for my own work, and try to keep tabs on interesting new work in the field. This book is striking because one of the major disputes in the study of Hinduism is whether there was ever a unified tradition that can be called "Hinduism" before the period of the British Raj, when British administrators and scholars began using the term to mean all non-Buddhist, non-Jain, non-Sikh, non-Muslim Indians. Some have said this means that there is no underlying unity or meaningful coherence to "Hinduism" before the 18th century, and others say that this is silly, of course there was, there just wasn't a need for a single term before then. I'm actually more of the first camp with the reservation that "meaningful" is a tricky word, and that it's more interesting to see how people on or near the subcontinent interacted with each other and their historical antecedents, including when and how they choose to adopt or give distinguishing corporate names to themselves and others (i.e, when do I start saying that "they" are Xists, and I'm Yist?). This new book is about one of the major pre-colonial attempts to formulate a sense of Hindu-ness, by Indian philosophers, and the previews online make it look very interesting. So I've got two books to which I'm really looking forward to reading.
5. Belated acknowledgment: Happy Birthday to my friends Livia (Monday) and Romulus* (Wednesday)!
* Romulus' name may have to change, as I need to check something but don't have the necessary information to hand at the moment.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Nature and movies
2010.10.03
Days Remaining: 239
1. This evening I watched the Black Stallion and Black Stallion Returns films on Netflix. I've been intending to view them for a while, as I had fond memories of both from my childhood, but they only recently became available for streaming, and I figured this would be a lovely way of spending the evening. The two films have different directors, though Francis Ford Coppola executive produced both, and they had the same actors (even the same horse as playing the Black, though there were apparently supplemental scenes with another horse in the second film). I enjoyed both of them, and they are largely as I recalled, plot-wise, but the difference in directors was nothing short of astonishing. Carroll Ballard directed the original film (he also directed Fly Away Home and, most recently, Duma) and it was far and away the superior of the two. First off, there is almost no musical soundtrack throughout, and when you do hear music, it is all the more compelling for its otherwise absence, as well as the way in which the classical music is allowed to integrate into natural sounds at both the beginning and end of its appearance (one crescendo actually blurs with waves crashing, for instance). Second, the film has very little speech throughout, and allows ambient sounds to filter through. When the protagonist and the horse are stranded on an island, you can hear the loneliness, and when the horse is spooked by a thunderstorm later, you can feel exactly why.
2. The reason I mention this is that I have been having a very interesting email exchange with one of the students in my Native American Religions class. I had them read Leslie Marmon Silko's short story "Yellow Woman," which is a retelling of a traditional Laguna Pueblo (southwestern Native American) story about a woman, Yellow Woman, who is abducted from a river bank by a spirit being and taken to his home on a mountain top. In the modern short story an unnamed narrator meets a strange man by a riverside and goes with him to his house up on a mountain. The narrator is never certain if the man is human or a mountain spirit, and cannot tell if she is role-playing a story she once heard, using the story as an excuse to do something she would otherwise not do, or if she is living out the story literally. One of the things we talk about is the problem of the man's nature and why Silko would retell a traditional story (commonly, but problematically, called a "myth" by most academics) in such a way as to leave the narrator and audience never quite sure what is going on. It's a very skillfully executed story, one of my personal favorites, and the students were left unsure what to make of it (which, I believe, is Silko's intention). I offered one internal detail that leads me to think that the man may be a spirit (though in the end, it's only one detail and not decisive). So my student wrote to me after class and said that she had other reasons to think he was a spirit, and laid them out. I responded with counterpoints to her arguments, and asked for her further reflections on what it would mean for the story if the man was a spirit: how would she read it differently than if he were just a man?
3. Her response was especially intriguing. If he were a spirit, she said, then it would be more straightforwardly fiction, and become comparable to fantasy literature and films. She offered, as a follow-up, that the entire story felt like a dream recounted, and said this was due to the occasional extremely lucid detail about the physical environment offered throughout (very vivid visual description, or close attention paid to some minor element of the setting). This, to her, felt like details in dreams, rather than in waking conscious apprehension of the everyday world. I had not expected this at all: my general understanding of this element of Silko's style is actually the opposite of the dream interpretation: I think these details are interwoven to ground the stories in physicality and render them, in some way, believably concrete. They also, I think, highlight the general deadening of our senses in industrial culture, where we are both subjected to constant overwhelming data streams demanding our attention and asked to handle them in a very quick fashion. Specific hard details that arise in our consciousness in punctuated fashion or over time often strike us a incongruous or even unsettling, but they are more what our systems evolved to handle.
4. This is where the Black Stallion cinematography and soundtrack come back in. The director chose to tell a story, one based on a book, in such a way that the natural world (and the horse within it) spoke much more directly and meaningfully than as background. They were brought into focus throughout as crucial elements to the viewer's perception of what is going on in the story; not scenery but characters in their own right. It served to integrate the boy and the horse into the world so that they only way to understand them was to see where they were and to see and hear what they were seeing and hearing. Ballard used to make documentaries, and it shows. The sequel, directed by someone else (can't remember right now and don't care enough to look it up) is a much more typical movie with intrusive soundtrack, animate character-focused plot and background for the sake of getting the action going. I preferred the first film tremendously, though I enjoyed the second. If you get a chance, I recommend both, but especially the first.
Days Remaining: 239
1. This evening I watched the Black Stallion and Black Stallion Returns films on Netflix. I've been intending to view them for a while, as I had fond memories of both from my childhood, but they only recently became available for streaming, and I figured this would be a lovely way of spending the evening. The two films have different directors, though Francis Ford Coppola executive produced both, and they had the same actors (even the same horse as playing the Black, though there were apparently supplemental scenes with another horse in the second film). I enjoyed both of them, and they are largely as I recalled, plot-wise, but the difference in directors was nothing short of astonishing. Carroll Ballard directed the original film (he also directed Fly Away Home and, most recently, Duma) and it was far and away the superior of the two. First off, there is almost no musical soundtrack throughout, and when you do hear music, it is all the more compelling for its otherwise absence, as well as the way in which the classical music is allowed to integrate into natural sounds at both the beginning and end of its appearance (one crescendo actually blurs with waves crashing, for instance). Second, the film has very little speech throughout, and allows ambient sounds to filter through. When the protagonist and the horse are stranded on an island, you can hear the loneliness, and when the horse is spooked by a thunderstorm later, you can feel exactly why.
2. The reason I mention this is that I have been having a very interesting email exchange with one of the students in my Native American Religions class. I had them read Leslie Marmon Silko's short story "Yellow Woman," which is a retelling of a traditional Laguna Pueblo (southwestern Native American) story about a woman, Yellow Woman, who is abducted from a river bank by a spirit being and taken to his home on a mountain top. In the modern short story an unnamed narrator meets a strange man by a riverside and goes with him to his house up on a mountain. The narrator is never certain if the man is human or a mountain spirit, and cannot tell if she is role-playing a story she once heard, using the story as an excuse to do something she would otherwise not do, or if she is living out the story literally. One of the things we talk about is the problem of the man's nature and why Silko would retell a traditional story (commonly, but problematically, called a "myth" by most academics) in such a way as to leave the narrator and audience never quite sure what is going on. It's a very skillfully executed story, one of my personal favorites, and the students were left unsure what to make of it (which, I believe, is Silko's intention). I offered one internal detail that leads me to think that the man may be a spirit (though in the end, it's only one detail and not decisive). So my student wrote to me after class and said that she had other reasons to think he was a spirit, and laid them out. I responded with counterpoints to her arguments, and asked for her further reflections on what it would mean for the story if the man was a spirit: how would she read it differently than if he were just a man?
3. Her response was especially intriguing. If he were a spirit, she said, then it would be more straightforwardly fiction, and become comparable to fantasy literature and films. She offered, as a follow-up, that the entire story felt like a dream recounted, and said this was due to the occasional extremely lucid detail about the physical environment offered throughout (very vivid visual description, or close attention paid to some minor element of the setting). This, to her, felt like details in dreams, rather than in waking conscious apprehension of the everyday world. I had not expected this at all: my general understanding of this element of Silko's style is actually the opposite of the dream interpretation: I think these details are interwoven to ground the stories in physicality and render them, in some way, believably concrete. They also, I think, highlight the general deadening of our senses in industrial culture, where we are both subjected to constant overwhelming data streams demanding our attention and asked to handle them in a very quick fashion. Specific hard details that arise in our consciousness in punctuated fashion or over time often strike us a incongruous or even unsettling, but they are more what our systems evolved to handle.
4. This is where the Black Stallion cinematography and soundtrack come back in. The director chose to tell a story, one based on a book, in such a way that the natural world (and the horse within it) spoke much more directly and meaningfully than as background. They were brought into focus throughout as crucial elements to the viewer's perception of what is going on in the story; not scenery but characters in their own right. It served to integrate the boy and the horse into the world so that they only way to understand them was to see where they were and to see and hear what they were seeing and hearing. Ballard used to make documentaries, and it shows. The sequel, directed by someone else (can't remember right now and don't care enough to look it up) is a much more typical movie with intrusive soundtrack, animate character-focused plot and background for the sake of getting the action going. I preferred the first film tremendously, though I enjoyed the second. If you get a chance, I recommend both, but especially the first.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Benu Birds and Pouring Rain
2010.10.01
Days Remaining: 241
1. It's been 10 days since my last post, a lacuna far greater than I would have intended if I had planned it, instead of making a series of incremental decisions both active and passive resulting in posting nothing new. Some of it, I suppose, has been particular days that were chock-full of work. Some of it was feeling less than great due to the lingering effects of whatever respiratory infection I had last week (I'm still coughing wetly periodically). Some of it has been laziness. But most of it has been based substantially upon mood in its basest form: I've been out of sorts and sad off and on for days now.
2. I've commented, in direct conversation, to many of you that the most emotionally difficult part of my divorce has been leaving behind my dog, Herman. I sometimes wonder if missing Herman is somehow emblematic of, or encapsulates, the rest of the emotional turmoil that understandably attends a divorce. Maybe if I had been able to get custody of him I would have been sad about something else. My apartment is far too small for a 65 pound German Shepherd/Husky mix, and it would have been a major source of complications in making plans if I had him. But I really do find myself missing him tremendously. This was the case even when I was staying with my parents this summer, so I don't think it's just a specific focus of general loneliness. My ex-wife sent me a message and photo of Herman on Monday this week; she's begun giving him half a can of wet food as part of his dinner each night (he loves wet food, but we couldn't afford it as anything more than an occasional treat). I was kind of jealous, because I had suggested, last year, that maybe we should do this, but we were constrained by money at the time, and now she can do it (the cats eat wet food each meal because even with three cats, it's vastly less expensive than feeding a full grown dog). Apparently for the rest of that first night Herman would go back to his bowl repeatedly on the off chance that there was any more wet food that showed up while he was in another room.
3. I formally filed for divorce on Wednesday, finally. My money situation is such that I don't have a lot of spending cash on hand, and so I've been very careful to not make more trips to Providence than necessary. After my first, thwarted, attempt to file for divorce on 15 September (stopped cold by the fact that I didn't bring my Marriage Certificate with me to the Family Court - because when I called twice to ask what documentation I needed to bring, both times the persons with whom I spoke neglected to mention the Marriage Certificate), I had to a) find my Marriage Certificate buried in packed boxes and b) do another 120 mile round trip to file. I had a therapy appointment this past Wednesday morning and so that was when the filing would have to happen.
4. Though I was successful this time around, the process is almost comical in ways that it isn't easy. I was given an Instruction Sheet along with the forms and told to follow instructions closely, because there are parts of the forms that are supposed to only be filled in by the court personnel. So, okay. The forms were 14 pages long, and the Instruction Sheet's instructions stopped at Page 7. So I filled out everything I was told to do through Page 7, then went back up to the desk. Then I was informed that I needed to fill out Pages 8-14, and that I had left substantial portions of Pages 1-7 blank. When I pointed out that I had only filled out what the Instructions told me to fill out, the clerk was very unhappy with me. I cannot be the first person to have noted the Instruction Sheet's incompleteness, but in the clerk's eyes I was clearly at fault for having an Instruction Sheet that didn't work. So back I went to fill in the rest, including all of the places where the clerk marked Xs on Pages 1-7 to show what I had missed. Then, after doing this, I went back to the desk, and discovered I was still missing some things, including boxes she hadn't marked with an X (though, by this time, she was becoming generally nicer for some reason - maybe because she realized that I was there to file for divorce, something that is probably (not inevitably) emotionally difficult.
5. Then, when that was completed, she took my check for $120, my Marriage Certificate (they want the original for this process), and informed me that this "won't be filed today." She said I should call them on Friday to see if it was done yet, but no promises. And, of course, today I am not free to drive to and from Providence (at least 2.5 hours of traveling, parking, etc.), so I'll have to go back on Monday, if the forms are, in fact, filed by that time. Why do I need to go back? Because they won't mail them to the Sheriff's office to be served to my (not quite yet) ex-wife. I offered to give them the stamped envelopes etc, but they "don't do that." So I have to go back to pick up the forms and put them in a mailbox.
6. It took 10 minutes and $30 to get the marriage certificate. According to Delaware state law, you can actually just declare yourself married if you have the certificate. You don't even need an officiant. But if you want to get divorced, oh, the state will not make it simple (I doubt that they could ever make it easy). Granted, this process is complicated by my distance from Providence, but on general principle they should at the minimum make the correct information available and be able to provide a realistic timeline for the processing of the suit.
7. Anyway, I'm now much closer, in legal terms, to the formal dissolution of my marriage. I have never yet had a second thought about the correctness of my decision to leave. But I do go through periods of missing my ex-wife, and regretting that things have come to this. As I walked out of the courthouse on Wednesday afternoon, having just turned over the forms, my Marriage Certificate, and the processing fee (i.e., everything done in order and set to go), I said, out loud, "Goodbye, wife." I don't know if that was some sort of self-inflected melodrama or something else. But the sense of finality was really...immediate. I had done it, and this is where I am, now, formally and officially.
8. Classes are going well; in fact in some ways they're excellent, if exhausting (the lingering respiratory symptoms make lecturing for 5 straight hours difficult). I was asked to do two dorm talks this coming month on Halloween and ghosts. I did this last year, and they were apparently very popular. The second talk this time is probably going to be on Halloween itself, which is kind of neat. I've also been very encouraged by the slowly increasing number of students who have been coming to office hours or sending me emails wanting to discuss further things we talk about in class. It's not all of my students, but I really enjoy knowing that the classes motivate some of them to want more and to think further on their own.
9. There are a lot of other things I've been thinking about over the past week and a half, but I need to get to campus to grade essays, do office work, and then participate tonight in the dreaded Houndalympics (goes from 7pm-3am...sigh). I will work harder to not let the long gap between posts occur again.
10. Oh, and a shout out to my niece, Iunia, for being appointed Student of the Week at her kindergarten class, and to my nephew, Euander, for scoring a goal in a soccer game last weekend. I'm very proud of you both!
Days Remaining: 241
1. It's been 10 days since my last post, a lacuna far greater than I would have intended if I had planned it, instead of making a series of incremental decisions both active and passive resulting in posting nothing new. Some of it, I suppose, has been particular days that were chock-full of work. Some of it was feeling less than great due to the lingering effects of whatever respiratory infection I had last week (I'm still coughing wetly periodically). Some of it has been laziness. But most of it has been based substantially upon mood in its basest form: I've been out of sorts and sad off and on for days now.
2. I've commented, in direct conversation, to many of you that the most emotionally difficult part of my divorce has been leaving behind my dog, Herman. I sometimes wonder if missing Herman is somehow emblematic of, or encapsulates, the rest of the emotional turmoil that understandably attends a divorce. Maybe if I had been able to get custody of him I would have been sad about something else. My apartment is far too small for a 65 pound German Shepherd/Husky mix, and it would have been a major source of complications in making plans if I had him. But I really do find myself missing him tremendously. This was the case even when I was staying with my parents this summer, so I don't think it's just a specific focus of general loneliness. My ex-wife sent me a message and photo of Herman on Monday this week; she's begun giving him half a can of wet food as part of his dinner each night (he loves wet food, but we couldn't afford it as anything more than an occasional treat). I was kind of jealous, because I had suggested, last year, that maybe we should do this, but we were constrained by money at the time, and now she can do it (the cats eat wet food each meal because even with three cats, it's vastly less expensive than feeding a full grown dog). Apparently for the rest of that first night Herman would go back to his bowl repeatedly on the off chance that there was any more wet food that showed up while he was in another room.
3. I formally filed for divorce on Wednesday, finally. My money situation is such that I don't have a lot of spending cash on hand, and so I've been very careful to not make more trips to Providence than necessary. After my first, thwarted, attempt to file for divorce on 15 September (stopped cold by the fact that I didn't bring my Marriage Certificate with me to the Family Court - because when I called twice to ask what documentation I needed to bring, both times the persons with whom I spoke neglected to mention the Marriage Certificate), I had to a) find my Marriage Certificate buried in packed boxes and b) do another 120 mile round trip to file. I had a therapy appointment this past Wednesday morning and so that was when the filing would have to happen.
4. Though I was successful this time around, the process is almost comical in ways that it isn't easy. I was given an Instruction Sheet along with the forms and told to follow instructions closely, because there are parts of the forms that are supposed to only be filled in by the court personnel. So, okay. The forms were 14 pages long, and the Instruction Sheet's instructions stopped at Page 7. So I filled out everything I was told to do through Page 7, then went back up to the desk. Then I was informed that I needed to fill out Pages 8-14, and that I had left substantial portions of Pages 1-7 blank. When I pointed out that I had only filled out what the Instructions told me to fill out, the clerk was very unhappy with me. I cannot be the first person to have noted the Instruction Sheet's incompleteness, but in the clerk's eyes I was clearly at fault for having an Instruction Sheet that didn't work. So back I went to fill in the rest, including all of the places where the clerk marked Xs on Pages 1-7 to show what I had missed. Then, after doing this, I went back to the desk, and discovered I was still missing some things, including boxes she hadn't marked with an X (though, by this time, she was becoming generally nicer for some reason - maybe because she realized that I was there to file for divorce, something that is probably (not inevitably) emotionally difficult.
5. Then, when that was completed, she took my check for $120, my Marriage Certificate (they want the original for this process), and informed me that this "won't be filed today." She said I should call them on Friday to see if it was done yet, but no promises. And, of course, today I am not free to drive to and from Providence (at least 2.5 hours of traveling, parking, etc.), so I'll have to go back on Monday, if the forms are, in fact, filed by that time. Why do I need to go back? Because they won't mail them to the Sheriff's office to be served to my (not quite yet) ex-wife. I offered to give them the stamped envelopes etc, but they "don't do that." So I have to go back to pick up the forms and put them in a mailbox.
6. It took 10 minutes and $30 to get the marriage certificate. According to Delaware state law, you can actually just declare yourself married if you have the certificate. You don't even need an officiant. But if you want to get divorced, oh, the state will not make it simple (I doubt that they could ever make it easy). Granted, this process is complicated by my distance from Providence, but on general principle they should at the minimum make the correct information available and be able to provide a realistic timeline for the processing of the suit.
7. Anyway, I'm now much closer, in legal terms, to the formal dissolution of my marriage. I have never yet had a second thought about the correctness of my decision to leave. But I do go through periods of missing my ex-wife, and regretting that things have come to this. As I walked out of the courthouse on Wednesday afternoon, having just turned over the forms, my Marriage Certificate, and the processing fee (i.e., everything done in order and set to go), I said, out loud, "Goodbye, wife." I don't know if that was some sort of self-inflected melodrama or something else. But the sense of finality was really...immediate. I had done it, and this is where I am, now, formally and officially.
8. Classes are going well; in fact in some ways they're excellent, if exhausting (the lingering respiratory symptoms make lecturing for 5 straight hours difficult). I was asked to do two dorm talks this coming month on Halloween and ghosts. I did this last year, and they were apparently very popular. The second talk this time is probably going to be on Halloween itself, which is kind of neat. I've also been very encouraged by the slowly increasing number of students who have been coming to office hours or sending me emails wanting to discuss further things we talk about in class. It's not all of my students, but I really enjoy knowing that the classes motivate some of them to want more and to think further on their own.
9. There are a lot of other things I've been thinking about over the past week and a half, but I need to get to campus to grade essays, do office work, and then participate tonight in the dreaded Houndalympics (goes from 7pm-3am...sigh). I will work harder to not let the long gap between posts occur again.
10. Oh, and a shout out to my niece, Iunia, for being appointed Student of the Week at her kindergarten class, and to my nephew, Euander, for scoring a goal in a soccer game last weekend. I'm very proud of you both!
Monday, September 20, 2010
Darkness and Light
2010.09.22
Days Remaining: 251
1. Clearly I've decided not to update this blog everyday. Now that the semester has started there are some days (particularly Tuesdays and Thursdays) when I know I'll be working throughout, and it occurred to me that I'd rather write less frequently but have something of substance to say, than to make a point of blathering every day.
2. For now, I'm navel-gazing because I am ill. What I thought was an allergy attack yesterday ('tis the season for it, or at least a season for it) now has me with a sore throat, low-grade fever, and an aching head, not normally symptoms of allergies. I made it through classes yesterday with my nose running like a faucet, but by the time I got home I was beginning to wear down significantly. This, because Murphy is unkind, was accompanied by a degree of wakefulness that kept me up until 130am (but, my newly recalibrated sleep cycle then had me awake by 8am). Thankfully, today I didn't need to go anywhere, and could work from my desk here. Now that the sun has set, my headache is coming back hardcore for some reason, and I may go to bed very early. Tomorrow I need to teach. Sigh.
3. Before I go further, I would like to voice a message of sympathy for my youngest sister, Silvia, and her fiance, whose father's health has taken a serious turn for the worst. They are apparently on watch for his death, something that I cannot imagine but to be terrible to go through.
4. I'm teaching a class right now called Love, Death & Desire which is sort of an intellectual history of European (mostly Christian, but with Jewish and Muslim elements thrown in) culture organized around the course title's key terms. We start with Hesiod, Genesis, Plato, etc. and then work through to the 20th century. Death has been on my mind a lot the past two weeks because of this, as we just read a very good short book by Herbert Fingarette titled Death: Philosophical Soundings (http://www.opencourtbooks.com/books_n/death.htm ). I put that book, which is about the ways that we imagine and think with death as a fact of life, in dialogue with another text I've been reading, which probably seems far more frivolous. It's a fanfiction rewrite of the Harry Potter series called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality ). In the rewrite, Dumbledore asks Harry (who is very different from the character in Rowling's books) why he thinks that Dark Wizards fear death. And, contrary to expectations, Harry gives an impassioned plea, couched in the language of cold reason, why we should all hate death and try to live forever. This has been troubling me since I read it. The rewrite's Dumbledore argues that death is the beginning of something further, a move towards an afterlife, and Harry (quite rightly) points out that Dumbledore has no real proof of that (in this rewrite, ghosts are basically energy shadows of wizards, not autonomous spirits).
5. But I cannot apparently bring myself to agree with the rewritten Harry. It's not because I believe that there is conclusive evidence for an afterlife (though I will say that there is very suggestive, if inconsistent and unfortunately mostly untestable, evidence). I suppose that it's because I am deeply suspicious, and even uncomfortable, with the idea that humans as humans are entitled to overcome the fundamental conditions of our existence. I worry, because this seems to me to be predicated on a body/mind dichotomy that goes back at least as far as Plato (and I would argue actually to the Pythagoreans if not earlier) in the West, which not only posits a fundamental distinction between our selves and our bodies, but also arranges them hierarchically, so that bodies become at best tools for our minds, and at worst enemies to be overcome. This may sound hyperbolic, but American culture today expends enormous amounts of financial, intellectual, and technological capitol on attempting to stave off dying for as long as possible. We regularly insist that we are more than our bodies, that we should be able to have it all (that is, our desires are felt to be unjustly thwarted by material contexts and constraints), and treat our bodies like toys (think how easy it is to eat junk, live unhealthily, and then assume that medical science should be able to prolong our existences).
6. Of course, the desire to live forever is hardly restricted to Western cultures; one of my favorite religious traditions, Daoism, has as one major strand in its larger composite the attempt, via alchemical (chemical, bodily, meditational, etc.) means, to transform one's body into a state that is aligned with the Dao, and therefore enduring and (if one is really good at it) eternal. There are lots of strong overlaps here with the West, although there are also important differences. What strikes me as crucial in both, for my current purposes, is the rejection of bodily limits as either unjust or fundamentally unnatural. In either case these limits (the biggest of them being mortality itself) are to be overcome.
7. And I don't feel that way. Eternity is only conceivable to me as a negation of regular aspects of life. Eternity would have to involve non-forgetting (because what's the point if you constantly replace old knowledge with new, such that your own identity becomes discontinuous over long periods of time?), non-hunger, non-tiredness, non-etc. I simply take my actual life and then undo all of the things that make up that life. Oddly enough, it sort of sounds like death when described in that fashion.
8. I just can't imagine true immortality being positive; I keep thinking I'd get bored. I'm more philosophically Daoist about this, I see life and death being intertwined and that not being a bad thing. I worry when human beings see themselves as fundamentally outside of the world. I'll follow Ursula K. LeGuin and Phillip Pullman on this: death is part of our pattern, and salvation is something you make in this life. I sound a little like Feuerbach or Marx when I write that, but I don't know that I would ever feel confident banking on the afterlife, given how uncertain that outcome is.
9. On a much lighter note, Belisarius has a very funny post about his two kids and their interactions, via note, on his blog: http://www.loudhandle.net/ . It's entitled "Sighned" and I recommend it very highly for a laugh.
Days Remaining: 251
1. Clearly I've decided not to update this blog everyday. Now that the semester has started there are some days (particularly Tuesdays and Thursdays) when I know I'll be working throughout, and it occurred to me that I'd rather write less frequently but have something of substance to say, than to make a point of blathering every day.
2. For now, I'm navel-gazing because I am ill. What I thought was an allergy attack yesterday ('tis the season for it, or at least a season for it) now has me with a sore throat, low-grade fever, and an aching head, not normally symptoms of allergies. I made it through classes yesterday with my nose running like a faucet, but by the time I got home I was beginning to wear down significantly. This, because Murphy is unkind, was accompanied by a degree of wakefulness that kept me up until 130am (but, my newly recalibrated sleep cycle then had me awake by 8am). Thankfully, today I didn't need to go anywhere, and could work from my desk here. Now that the sun has set, my headache is coming back hardcore for some reason, and I may go to bed very early. Tomorrow I need to teach. Sigh.
3. Before I go further, I would like to voice a message of sympathy for my youngest sister, Silvia, and her fiance, whose father's health has taken a serious turn for the worst. They are apparently on watch for his death, something that I cannot imagine but to be terrible to go through.
4. I'm teaching a class right now called Love, Death & Desire which is sort of an intellectual history of European (mostly Christian, but with Jewish and Muslim elements thrown in) culture organized around the course title's key terms. We start with Hesiod, Genesis, Plato, etc. and then work through to the 20th century. Death has been on my mind a lot the past two weeks because of this, as we just read a very good short book by Herbert Fingarette titled Death: Philosophical Soundings (http://www.opencourtbooks.com/books_n/death.htm ). I put that book, which is about the ways that we imagine and think with death as a fact of life, in dialogue with another text I've been reading, which probably seems far more frivolous. It's a fanfiction rewrite of the Harry Potter series called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality ). In the rewrite, Dumbledore asks Harry (who is very different from the character in Rowling's books) why he thinks that Dark Wizards fear death. And, contrary to expectations, Harry gives an impassioned plea, couched in the language of cold reason, why we should all hate death and try to live forever. This has been troubling me since I read it. The rewrite's Dumbledore argues that death is the beginning of something further, a move towards an afterlife, and Harry (quite rightly) points out that Dumbledore has no real proof of that (in this rewrite, ghosts are basically energy shadows of wizards, not autonomous spirits).
5. But I cannot apparently bring myself to agree with the rewritten Harry. It's not because I believe that there is conclusive evidence for an afterlife (though I will say that there is very suggestive, if inconsistent and unfortunately mostly untestable, evidence). I suppose that it's because I am deeply suspicious, and even uncomfortable, with the idea that humans as humans are entitled to overcome the fundamental conditions of our existence. I worry, because this seems to me to be predicated on a body/mind dichotomy that goes back at least as far as Plato (and I would argue actually to the Pythagoreans if not earlier) in the West, which not only posits a fundamental distinction between our selves and our bodies, but also arranges them hierarchically, so that bodies become at best tools for our minds, and at worst enemies to be overcome. This may sound hyperbolic, but American culture today expends enormous amounts of financial, intellectual, and technological capitol on attempting to stave off dying for as long as possible. We regularly insist that we are more than our bodies, that we should be able to have it all (that is, our desires are felt to be unjustly thwarted by material contexts and constraints), and treat our bodies like toys (think how easy it is to eat junk, live unhealthily, and then assume that medical science should be able to prolong our existences).
6. Of course, the desire to live forever is hardly restricted to Western cultures; one of my favorite religious traditions, Daoism, has as one major strand in its larger composite the attempt, via alchemical (chemical, bodily, meditational, etc.) means, to transform one's body into a state that is aligned with the Dao, and therefore enduring and (if one is really good at it) eternal. There are lots of strong overlaps here with the West, although there are also important differences. What strikes me as crucial in both, for my current purposes, is the rejection of bodily limits as either unjust or fundamentally unnatural. In either case these limits (the biggest of them being mortality itself) are to be overcome.
7. And I don't feel that way. Eternity is only conceivable to me as a negation of regular aspects of life. Eternity would have to involve non-forgetting (because what's the point if you constantly replace old knowledge with new, such that your own identity becomes discontinuous over long periods of time?), non-hunger, non-tiredness, non-etc. I simply take my actual life and then undo all of the things that make up that life. Oddly enough, it sort of sounds like death when described in that fashion.
8. I just can't imagine true immortality being positive; I keep thinking I'd get bored. I'm more philosophically Daoist about this, I see life and death being intertwined and that not being a bad thing. I worry when human beings see themselves as fundamentally outside of the world. I'll follow Ursula K. LeGuin and Phillip Pullman on this: death is part of our pattern, and salvation is something you make in this life. I sound a little like Feuerbach or Marx when I write that, but I don't know that I would ever feel confident banking on the afterlife, given how uncertain that outcome is.
9. On a much lighter note, Belisarius has a very funny post about his two kids and their interactions, via note, on his blog: http://www.loudhandle.net/ . It's entitled "Sighned" and I recommend it very highly for a laugh.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
2010.09.19
Days Remaining: 254
1. I'm back from the lovely Sea Isle City, NJ beach. I'm a bit sunburned (completely my own fault due to not properly applying sunblock), and tired, but the trip was really enjoyable and I had a lot of fun.
2. My drive southwards on Friday was an exercise in frustration, which thankfully did not augur anything at all for the weekend as a whole. In my attempt to avoid lateness, I left about an hour earlier than I would normally do, in order to have dinner with Barbatus and Livia (and their son, Caius).* But, as the best laid plans of mice are, so was mine. I ran into a traffic jam at New Haven (apparently on Fridays people in New Haven, CT get out of work en masse at approximately 1-130pm), then another one as I approached the George Washington Bridge in NYC. I am actually very fond of the GW, especially its upper level, and if traffic is moving smoothly, find that driving across it (especially at night in warm weather) an intensely pleasurable aesthetic experience. Most of the time, however, it's a royal pain in the tuckus. This time, it took me over an hour to travel approximately four miles, and once I was over the bridge and onto the New Jersey Turnpike, even at what was now quitting time on a Friday, I made great time. This, alas, conforms to my previous experience and leads to my working conclusion on crossing the GW: the bridge itself is the problem. The jam happens in getting over it, and is gone as soon as you cross. This has led me to a new plan for traveling southwards: I'm going to start using the Tappan Zee Bridge instead. I'm not sure if that will actually be any better, but the GW has been an enormous snag in travel time about 80% of the time in the past year's worth of traveling either south or north.
3. Once I got to Barbatus and Livia's house, we decided to drive into Princeton, NJ to have dinner (Livia and I ate at Panera Bread on Nassau Street, Barbatus and Caius having eaten before I arrived - Caius is a little over 2 years old, and needed to eat earlier while I was stuck in traffic). I took a class at Princeton back in my first year at UPenn, and have extremely fond memories of that semester (one of the happiest in my life), when I would take the train to Princeton each Thursday, participate in what was the single best seminar I was ever enrolled in, and then have dinner with Barbatus and Livia before catching a late train home to Philadelphia. Every part of it was good: I rode in with another student from Philadelphia (an archaeology grad student at Bryn Mawr), had the seminar, got to hang out in Princeton (often, but not always, in the bookstores) until either Barbatus or Livia picked me up, then got to spend the evening with two of my favorite people, then rode the train at my favorite time of day: late evening when the cars are mostly empty. As the semester ran on, I got into the habit of standing between cars (which you're not supposed to do) and feeling the warmer air flow past, looking at the landscape, and generally feeling like all was right with the world. Anyway, we ate our dinner on Friday night sitting on a bench by the cathedral on Princeton's campus, and it was lovely. The evening air got cooler, but I'm not dissuaded by cool air, and walking around campus, chasing after Caius (who loves to run), was a lot of fun.
4. Then I got on the road again around 830pm or so, and drove onwards. I'm not a fan of driving someplace completely new at night. The summer after I graduated from high school I went to a Longwood Garden fountains-and-fireworks display with my family and then-girlfriend. There was a thunderstorm, and after everyone left my girlfriend and I waited and walked through the Conservatory (one of my favorite places to walk). When we left, it was very foggy, and I got turned around leaving the parking lot, and we had to figure out how we had gotten lost and how to make our way back to Wilmington. I don't know if that is the source of my discomfort, but it always stands out as a point where I was very uncomfortable with not knowing where I was going in the dark (n.b., I have no trouble whatsoever getting lost and finding new ways to places during daylight hours). Anyway, on Friday night I made my way without mishap to Sea Isle City. The drive was made very pleasant by the moonlight, especially when there were no other cars around to provide light pollution. The strangest part of the drive was a visual encounter with...something. While relatively near Sea Isle City, on a stretch of road with heavy vegetation on either side of the highway, I drove past what I assume was a hitchhiker-hiker. What I saw, however, was a 6-7ft tall shape that seemed to be jogging (it was leaning forward at the top), clothed in extremely baggy attire. It basically flashed into and out of my vision in a second, but it was very jarring to suddenly register that I was not the only person on that stretch of road.
5. Sea Isle City is located, surprisingly, on an island, and as I drove closer to the beach house it became clear how very narrow the island is. The open ocean was on my left and the bay to my right, with a handful of houses to each side off the main road at each intersection. The summer's official end a few weeks ago has left the beach towns (excepting Atlantic City, which seemed to be hopping as I drove by its entrance roadway) largely depopulated, and so the final stretch of the trip was interestingly like moving into a ghost town. I arrived at the beach house around 11pm, was greeted at the door by my beloved niece and nephew, Iunia and Euander, did a quick tour (Iunia likes to show people around places), and then we all went to bed. I was very tired (I'm getting used to earlier bedtimes now), but couldn't sleep, and so I stayed up a bit to read my copy of the Evan Dorkin/Jill Thompson graphic novel Beasts of Burden (http://www.amazon.com/Beasts-Burden-Evan-Dorkin/dp/1595825134/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284943883&sr=8-1), about a paranormal investigating society composed entirely of dogs and cats. Sounds silly, I know, but it's actually a horror series, and I discovered that many of its constituent stories are very, very sad.
5.2. On a sad note, my mom told me yesterday morning that my parents' next-door neighbor's dog, Christa, was euthanized last Monday (she had cancer). Christa was a 13 year old Scottish terrier who loved my parents from the moment they moved into that house, and she was a regular source of happiness to me over the summer as I was beginning to deal with giving up my dog, Herman. Her owner said that my parents' arrival was like a new lease on life for Christa, and I always took joy in the fact that she would run over to the porch whenever she saw any of us outside (sometimes she got so excited she'd come into the house, which was adorable). She loved carrots, and we had bags of baby carrots whose sole purpose was to be fed to Christa in the evenings. She was very sweet, and I know that her owner is feeling her absence terribly. I'll miss you, too, Chrissy. My ex-wife tells me that Herman, who is 12.5 years old, has had some trouble with one of his back legs the last week or so, wherein it seems to go to sleep when he's lying down, so that when he wakes up he can't put any weight on it. After a moment or two he's fine, but this is something new for him. I really miss him, and hope that he's okay. My handsome fellow (the word "guy" was used for the cats).
6. Saturday morning dawned bright and beautiful, with Euander coming in to wake me up (Iunia was waking up my parents). We all went to breakfast at local pancake house and then got suited up and headed to the beach. There were very few people there, but the weather was clear and warm, the water was very comfortable, and it was wonderful. My parents sat on folding chairs talking with my sister, Selena,** and her husband, Iunius. I went to walk in the water while the kids started building a sand castle (very cutely, they started right by the chairs, probably close to 75 ft uphill and inland from the waves, and then wanted to dig a canal to bring the water up to their moat). When they saw me walking in the breakers, the kids came down, and soon Iunius came too. We spent a few hours in the surf, and the kids loved it. I was very impressed by their enthusiasm for being in the water, especially because, given their small size, the waves were very big for them. They both liked jumping over/through the breakers, and eventually Iunia started doing a low-key kind of body surfing (she'd lay on the sand in a few inches of out-going water, and wait for the next wave to lift her and carry her inward). Selena got a boogie board from the beach house (it was not a good boogie board, btw - very flimsy) and Iunius and I got Iunia on that for several rides. Selena took pictures and video of it, and I can't wait to see them! Eventually we all went and sat on the folding chairs (my parents having gone back to the beach house) and I began working on the sand castle with the kids. Finally, we went in, just in time as the incoming tide began washing up to where our seats were (the tidal distance at Sea Isle City is astonishing, probably 100+ ft from low to high tides).
7. After getting cleaned up we went to have dinner at a local pizza shop, then went driving to find ice cream. This was harder than it might sound, as most of the ice cream places were closed for the season. We drove through several towns along the island's length, and finally found a place that is closing today (the 19th). That shop was on a strip by the boardwalk (I'm not sure which town it was in), where a "season's end" fair was going on, with a DJ playing dance music for kids. We went there and everyone danced for a while (though I refrained from the YMCA). Iunia and Euander are very enthusiastic dancers, currently enrolled in a Hip Hop dance class at the YMCA in Wilmington, and they were showing off their moves last night. Then we all headed back to the beach house to relax. Iunius watched a football game and we talked for a while, and then to bed.
8. This morning we got up, did laundry (sheets and towels), and then headed out around 10am. The trip back, to be aesthetically balanced, took about 6 hours (it should have taken four) due to New Jersey road construction on the Garden State Parkway, followed by bridge trouble again, and then heavy traffic on I-95 in Connecticut. I'm just not going to win the traveling thing, I think. Octavian, who is coming into town again for business, left NYC around 5pm, and called me close to 9pm to say that he was only just getting through Lyme, CT, so the traffic situation did not improve after I got off the road. On the upside, Octavian and I are having dinner tomorrow night, which will be good. Thai food: it's awesome.
9. The only other thing of note that I can think to mention is a follow-up from last week. I did not, in fact, file for divorce on Wednesday as I had planned. This was not, however, for lack of trying. I called the Rhode Island Family Court twice in preparation to make sure that I had everything I needed, and both times the persons with whom I spoke neglected to mention that I needed a copy of my marriage certificate. I suppose, in retrospect, that it makes sense I would need this, but when I asked them what documentation I should bring, both times they did not mention it. I've been paying taxes to the state of Rhode Island as a married person for several years now, so it didn't occur to me that they'd need proof of marriage. So tomorrow morning I go back up to finish the process. It's another 2 hours of traveling, round trip. Sigh.
10. So, overall, the weekend was lovely, and I'm very grateful to Selena and Iunius for having me along. I love seeing Iunia and Euander, and had a good time talking with my mom and dad. I had fun seeing Barbatus, Livia, and Caius, and good memories were awoken on Princeton's campus. The beach is, in my experience, always good, and I couldn't have asked for nicer weather. Sometimes, things just go well.
* This post will include many pseudonyms, which may give some more data to those who are trying to figure out what my silly naming system is.
** Selena self-selected her own name, so it's not an example of my system.
Days Remaining: 254
1. I'm back from the lovely Sea Isle City, NJ beach. I'm a bit sunburned (completely my own fault due to not properly applying sunblock), and tired, but the trip was really enjoyable and I had a lot of fun.
2. My drive southwards on Friday was an exercise in frustration, which thankfully did not augur anything at all for the weekend as a whole. In my attempt to avoid lateness, I left about an hour earlier than I would normally do, in order to have dinner with Barbatus and Livia (and their son, Caius).* But, as the best laid plans of mice are, so was mine. I ran into a traffic jam at New Haven (apparently on Fridays people in New Haven, CT get out of work en masse at approximately 1-130pm), then another one as I approached the George Washington Bridge in NYC. I am actually very fond of the GW, especially its upper level, and if traffic is moving smoothly, find that driving across it (especially at night in warm weather) an intensely pleasurable aesthetic experience. Most of the time, however, it's a royal pain in the tuckus. This time, it took me over an hour to travel approximately four miles, and once I was over the bridge and onto the New Jersey Turnpike, even at what was now quitting time on a Friday, I made great time. This, alas, conforms to my previous experience and leads to my working conclusion on crossing the GW: the bridge itself is the problem. The jam happens in getting over it, and is gone as soon as you cross. This has led me to a new plan for traveling southwards: I'm going to start using the Tappan Zee Bridge instead. I'm not sure if that will actually be any better, but the GW has been an enormous snag in travel time about 80% of the time in the past year's worth of traveling either south or north.
3. Once I got to Barbatus and Livia's house, we decided to drive into Princeton, NJ to have dinner (Livia and I ate at Panera Bread on Nassau Street, Barbatus and Caius having eaten before I arrived - Caius is a little over 2 years old, and needed to eat earlier while I was stuck in traffic). I took a class at Princeton back in my first year at UPenn, and have extremely fond memories of that semester (one of the happiest in my life), when I would take the train to Princeton each Thursday, participate in what was the single best seminar I was ever enrolled in, and then have dinner with Barbatus and Livia before catching a late train home to Philadelphia. Every part of it was good: I rode in with another student from Philadelphia (an archaeology grad student at Bryn Mawr), had the seminar, got to hang out in Princeton (often, but not always, in the bookstores) until either Barbatus or Livia picked me up, then got to spend the evening with two of my favorite people, then rode the train at my favorite time of day: late evening when the cars are mostly empty. As the semester ran on, I got into the habit of standing between cars (which you're not supposed to do) and feeling the warmer air flow past, looking at the landscape, and generally feeling like all was right with the world. Anyway, we ate our dinner on Friday night sitting on a bench by the cathedral on Princeton's campus, and it was lovely. The evening air got cooler, but I'm not dissuaded by cool air, and walking around campus, chasing after Caius (who loves to run), was a lot of fun.
4. Then I got on the road again around 830pm or so, and drove onwards. I'm not a fan of driving someplace completely new at night. The summer after I graduated from high school I went to a Longwood Garden fountains-and-fireworks display with my family and then-girlfriend. There was a thunderstorm, and after everyone left my girlfriend and I waited and walked through the Conservatory (one of my favorite places to walk). When we left, it was very foggy, and I got turned around leaving the parking lot, and we had to figure out how we had gotten lost and how to make our way back to Wilmington. I don't know if that is the source of my discomfort, but it always stands out as a point where I was very uncomfortable with not knowing where I was going in the dark (n.b., I have no trouble whatsoever getting lost and finding new ways to places during daylight hours). Anyway, on Friday night I made my way without mishap to Sea Isle City. The drive was made very pleasant by the moonlight, especially when there were no other cars around to provide light pollution. The strangest part of the drive was a visual encounter with...something. While relatively near Sea Isle City, on a stretch of road with heavy vegetation on either side of the highway, I drove past what I assume was a hitchhiker-hiker. What I saw, however, was a 6-7ft tall shape that seemed to be jogging (it was leaning forward at the top), clothed in extremely baggy attire. It basically flashed into and out of my vision in a second, but it was very jarring to suddenly register that I was not the only person on that stretch of road.
5. Sea Isle City is located, surprisingly, on an island, and as I drove closer to the beach house it became clear how very narrow the island is. The open ocean was on my left and the bay to my right, with a handful of houses to each side off the main road at each intersection. The summer's official end a few weeks ago has left the beach towns (excepting Atlantic City, which seemed to be hopping as I drove by its entrance roadway) largely depopulated, and so the final stretch of the trip was interestingly like moving into a ghost town. I arrived at the beach house around 11pm, was greeted at the door by my beloved niece and nephew, Iunia and Euander, did a quick tour (Iunia likes to show people around places), and then we all went to bed. I was very tired (I'm getting used to earlier bedtimes now), but couldn't sleep, and so I stayed up a bit to read my copy of the Evan Dorkin/Jill Thompson graphic novel Beasts of Burden (http://www.amazon.com/Beasts-Burden-Evan-Dorkin/dp/1595825134/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284943883&sr=8-1), about a paranormal investigating society composed entirely of dogs and cats. Sounds silly, I know, but it's actually a horror series, and I discovered that many of its constituent stories are very, very sad.
5.2. On a sad note, my mom told me yesterday morning that my parents' next-door neighbor's dog, Christa, was euthanized last Monday (she had cancer). Christa was a 13 year old Scottish terrier who loved my parents from the moment they moved into that house, and she was a regular source of happiness to me over the summer as I was beginning to deal with giving up my dog, Herman. Her owner said that my parents' arrival was like a new lease on life for Christa, and I always took joy in the fact that she would run over to the porch whenever she saw any of us outside (sometimes she got so excited she'd come into the house, which was adorable). She loved carrots, and we had bags of baby carrots whose sole purpose was to be fed to Christa in the evenings. She was very sweet, and I know that her owner is feeling her absence terribly. I'll miss you, too, Chrissy. My ex-wife tells me that Herman, who is 12.5 years old, has had some trouble with one of his back legs the last week or so, wherein it seems to go to sleep when he's lying down, so that when he wakes up he can't put any weight on it. After a moment or two he's fine, but this is something new for him. I really miss him, and hope that he's okay. My handsome fellow (the word "guy" was used for the cats).
6. Saturday morning dawned bright and beautiful, with Euander coming in to wake me up (Iunia was waking up my parents). We all went to breakfast at local pancake house and then got suited up and headed to the beach. There were very few people there, but the weather was clear and warm, the water was very comfortable, and it was wonderful. My parents sat on folding chairs talking with my sister, Selena,** and her husband, Iunius. I went to walk in the water while the kids started building a sand castle (very cutely, they started right by the chairs, probably close to 75 ft uphill and inland from the waves, and then wanted to dig a canal to bring the water up to their moat). When they saw me walking in the breakers, the kids came down, and soon Iunius came too. We spent a few hours in the surf, and the kids loved it. I was very impressed by their enthusiasm for being in the water, especially because, given their small size, the waves were very big for them. They both liked jumping over/through the breakers, and eventually Iunia started doing a low-key kind of body surfing (she'd lay on the sand in a few inches of out-going water, and wait for the next wave to lift her and carry her inward). Selena got a boogie board from the beach house (it was not a good boogie board, btw - very flimsy) and Iunius and I got Iunia on that for several rides. Selena took pictures and video of it, and I can't wait to see them! Eventually we all went and sat on the folding chairs (my parents having gone back to the beach house) and I began working on the sand castle with the kids. Finally, we went in, just in time as the incoming tide began washing up to where our seats were (the tidal distance at Sea Isle City is astonishing, probably 100+ ft from low to high tides).
7. After getting cleaned up we went to have dinner at a local pizza shop, then went driving to find ice cream. This was harder than it might sound, as most of the ice cream places were closed for the season. We drove through several towns along the island's length, and finally found a place that is closing today (the 19th). That shop was on a strip by the boardwalk (I'm not sure which town it was in), where a "season's end" fair was going on, with a DJ playing dance music for kids. We went there and everyone danced for a while (though I refrained from the YMCA). Iunia and Euander are very enthusiastic dancers, currently enrolled in a Hip Hop dance class at the YMCA in Wilmington, and they were showing off their moves last night. Then we all headed back to the beach house to relax. Iunius watched a football game and we talked for a while, and then to bed.
8. This morning we got up, did laundry (sheets and towels), and then headed out around 10am. The trip back, to be aesthetically balanced, took about 6 hours (it should have taken four) due to New Jersey road construction on the Garden State Parkway, followed by bridge trouble again, and then heavy traffic on I-95 in Connecticut. I'm just not going to win the traveling thing, I think. Octavian, who is coming into town again for business, left NYC around 5pm, and called me close to 9pm to say that he was only just getting through Lyme, CT, so the traffic situation did not improve after I got off the road. On the upside, Octavian and I are having dinner tomorrow night, which will be good. Thai food: it's awesome.
9. The only other thing of note that I can think to mention is a follow-up from last week. I did not, in fact, file for divorce on Wednesday as I had planned. This was not, however, for lack of trying. I called the Rhode Island Family Court twice in preparation to make sure that I had everything I needed, and both times the persons with whom I spoke neglected to mention that I needed a copy of my marriage certificate. I suppose, in retrospect, that it makes sense I would need this, but when I asked them what documentation I should bring, both times they did not mention it. I've been paying taxes to the state of Rhode Island as a married person for several years now, so it didn't occur to me that they'd need proof of marriage. So tomorrow morning I go back up to finish the process. It's another 2 hours of traveling, round trip. Sigh.
10. So, overall, the weekend was lovely, and I'm very grateful to Selena and Iunius for having me along. I love seeing Iunia and Euander, and had a good time talking with my mom and dad. I had fun seeing Barbatus, Livia, and Caius, and good memories were awoken on Princeton's campus. The beach is, in my experience, always good, and I couldn't have asked for nicer weather. Sometimes, things just go well.
* This post will include many pseudonyms, which may give some more data to those who are trying to figure out what my silly naming system is.
** Selena self-selected her own name, so it's not an example of my system.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
2010.09.16
Days Remaining: 257
1. Oye. Sleep remains a problem, and by this time tonight I'm really falling to pieces. I spoke with Octavian earlier this evening, and he's been dealt a raw hand recently (I'd go into details as commiseration, but don't want to intrude on his privacy). Then I noted on Belisarius' blog (whereon I am known as Shrewsbury, btw), that he has contracted a cold transmitted via his Progeny and their return to public school. So, in perspective, not feeling rested is hardly a disaster. Still, I'd dearly love to sleep through a night sometime soon.
2. Classes today were by and large fine. I really do enjoy my job, and am encouraged that the Philosophy of Religion course has a very active class participation dynamic. I had two students drop this week, one frankly admitted that she wasn't really feeling the material, but the remaining 23 students are very involved in discussing the philosophical texts we're covering (today's conversation was mostly about Pascal's wager and then segued into how it could be related to Kierkegaard's "leap of faith" idea - this week has begun the question of how and why we believe religious claims). It's much more of a group conversation than I had anticipated it being, which is great. The Native American Religions class, on the other hand, though active, clearly suffers from a sub-par time slot, as the students are frequently crashing by the time they get there, so that even the engaged ones are less energetic than in previous classes. I don't know what to do about it, short of making them do jumping jacks before class to get their metabolisms to ratchet up a notch or two.
3. I received an email with the ominous heading "Houndalympics" (n.b. the name has been disguised as per usual), which I took to be one of the endless flow of "informative" emails that get sent out by the administration. Turns out, in fact, that I was wrong. Instead, the email informed me that one of the campus dorms has elected to adopt me as their faculty team member in the upcoming campus games. I was asked to either accept or decline and, if I accepted, to indicate which of the various games I would like to participate in. Given that I have a strict "Don't physically rough up, or be roughed up by, students" policy, I elected to be on the Crosswords team. So two weeks from tomorrow night I'll be basically pulling an all-nighter doing competitive crosswords and cheering on my team. The odd part is that I have no idea who these people are; I don't know where my students live, and if I had to guess, there are a three groups of students who might have chosen me. These three groups are comprised of students who've opted to take several of my classes, ask me to give talks in their dorms, invite me to their art exhibits, etc. Today I asked the first (my religious studies majors), and they said it wasn't them. So I'm left with my crunchily organic-living students, or my newspaper staff students. I've no idea which it is.
4. And that's it for now. Have a good night, all. Tomorrow, the beach.
Days Remaining: 257
1. Oye. Sleep remains a problem, and by this time tonight I'm really falling to pieces. I spoke with Octavian earlier this evening, and he's been dealt a raw hand recently (I'd go into details as commiseration, but don't want to intrude on his privacy). Then I noted on Belisarius' blog (whereon I am known as Shrewsbury, btw), that he has contracted a cold transmitted via his Progeny and their return to public school. So, in perspective, not feeling rested is hardly a disaster. Still, I'd dearly love to sleep through a night sometime soon.
2. Classes today were by and large fine. I really do enjoy my job, and am encouraged that the Philosophy of Religion course has a very active class participation dynamic. I had two students drop this week, one frankly admitted that she wasn't really feeling the material, but the remaining 23 students are very involved in discussing the philosophical texts we're covering (today's conversation was mostly about Pascal's wager and then segued into how it could be related to Kierkegaard's "leap of faith" idea - this week has begun the question of how and why we believe religious claims). It's much more of a group conversation than I had anticipated it being, which is great. The Native American Religions class, on the other hand, though active, clearly suffers from a sub-par time slot, as the students are frequently crashing by the time they get there, so that even the engaged ones are less energetic than in previous classes. I don't know what to do about it, short of making them do jumping jacks before class to get their metabolisms to ratchet up a notch or two.
3. I received an email with the ominous heading "Houndalympics" (n.b. the name has been disguised as per usual), which I took to be one of the endless flow of "informative" emails that get sent out by the administration. Turns out, in fact, that I was wrong. Instead, the email informed me that one of the campus dorms has elected to adopt me as their faculty team member in the upcoming campus games. I was asked to either accept or decline and, if I accepted, to indicate which of the various games I would like to participate in. Given that I have a strict "Don't physically rough up, or be roughed up by, students" policy, I elected to be on the Crosswords team. So two weeks from tomorrow night I'll be basically pulling an all-nighter doing competitive crosswords and cheering on my team. The odd part is that I have no idea who these people are; I don't know where my students live, and if I had to guess, there are a three groups of students who might have chosen me. These three groups are comprised of students who've opted to take several of my classes, ask me to give talks in their dorms, invite me to their art exhibits, etc. Today I asked the first (my religious studies majors), and they said it wasn't them. So I'm left with my crunchily organic-living students, or my newspaper staff students. I've no idea which it is.
4. And that's it for now. Have a good night, all. Tomorrow, the beach.
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