a bizarre form of entertainment

Mr. Baby went to his first opera the other night: I thought Mozart would be a lovely introduction to the genre, and the timing worked out to go to Don Giovanni.

It was an uncomfortable occasion for a couple of reasons, the first being that we went with an old friend of his, who as his former teacher and mentor, usually treats. Which is alright with me--I do like my treats--however, he purchased $160 tickets (that would be $160 each. For three of us). I realize that opera is not cheap, but there are cheaper seats and I could have gotten us student tix if it had just been me and Michael. So that was a bit blush-worthy. Moreover, the production had received a gruesome review in the latimes and so then, I felt all the guiltier for having suggested going to this show. It's odd, I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but when people do not enjoy the restaurants or shows I suggest, I feel like I've cooked the food or staged the play myself! and disappointed all and sundry personally! It's a weird phenomenon.

In any case, the staging was a bit chaotic and slightly incomprehensible, like it was being odd for the sake of edgy rather than any representational value. Michael was also surprised at the how much like Broadway type musical theater it was in that the audience would respond overtly after every aria and would go nuts over certain performers and reserve only polite golf claps after others. I've only been to operas in SF, where this is much less the case, but yes, the culture of gossip and evaluation is very much part of opera. And it is strange to be a part of.

His final word was that he would go with me to operas again but that, on the basis of this first dip into it, he would define an opera as a bad play, drawn out too long and poofed out by the singing parts--all an all, a bizarre form of entertainment.

Anyway, since then, I've gotten out a couple of not-too-tight, not-too-catchy postdocs. The work progresses if bumpily and without much enthusiasm.

I have a heap of work to do over the weekend: must read late Heidegger essays and prep a presentation (fri night and sat afternoon), read a set of poems by Cesar Zapata and get ready for a luncheon with him (sat evening), grade my students' revised compositions (sunday morning), and do a close reading of Chamoiseau (sat morning). Heaps!

Netflixed
Hot Fuzz
The movie takes an eternity to set up the main point--I'll back up, the hero is an overachieving british police officer who gets banished to the countryside because he's making his superiors in London look bad, and it turns out this country village is run by a loony tunes cult who want their village to be the perfect place on earth, that's the main discovery--but it is a brilliant example of artwork that is something and simultaneously consciously and overtly mocks it. Hot Fuzz does that with the "buddy movie" genre. Pina Bausch's show influenced by Japanese dance did the same thing: it borrowed the aesthetics of a foreign culture pretty superficially and clearly relished in that surface attraction, but also mocked it with great efficiency and class.

return to the business

I am home from the last thanksgiving with my family. My dad's family is really held together by my grandmother. She has a huge tumor in her innards. We've known for a while that she was ill, but it's the first time that I've seen her that she looks frail and slow and green. I don't know that I'll see her again since I'm not going home for Christmas. That is a very anxious feeling: I don't have anything particular to say to my grandmother, but it is very troubling and distracting that I will likely not have the opportunity to do so again. I have never enjoyed hanging out with my dad's family, but it's been part of my life for thirty years. And really, I think I will probably never do more than exchange emails with some of my cousins for the rest of my life--and given my track record, it will probably be less even than that. The trip up was hard, mostly because I thought I wouldn't feel much at all at this end of an era--if anything that I'd be relieved to be unburdened of this obligation--and instead I feel like it is an awkward sort of loss.

Now that I'm back, the november relaxation is fully over. It is now time to return to the business: the business of busting a move through a whole set of postdocs that I didn't really look at this whole month while I was out and about, enjoying the city. I have to finish the first by friday. However, there is no time in the week: the nights will be long and late, which will make the mornings shorter or more unbearable.

Meanwhile, rather than consider a new postdoc project and how to write a "letter of application," I am currently watching another unbearable Michael Henecke film, Code Unknown. It's really beautiful, even though it has a kind of pulp fiction/crashy set up: strangers whose lives intersect through a series of vignettes. Of course, since it's Henecke, it absolutely avoids the failure of those movies by making truly no attempt to turn the fragments into an overarching narrative with a meaning that is greater than the accumulation of fragments. Netflixed.

hiatus

My rash of good books and laughable movies continues: I saw The Prestige last night. It is in my netflix queue, but I picked it up from the library as I had no netflixies at home. So the movie is filled with puzzles and the narrative structure of gotchas is very pleasing: both competitive magicians are reading the "secret diary" of the other, which is actually meant for the readership of his opponent, as is revealed in the end, to the open-mouthed astonishment (Christian Bale) or clenched-mouthed frustration (Hugh Jackson) of the other. However, when the secret is revealed at the end, it's beyond annoyingly pathetically ridiculous: after all this palaver about how people want the mystery and the secret itself is very pedestrian, the movie recreates this pedestrian quality at the end. Why didn't they follow the script's advice and keep the secret, which SPOILER resorts to the identical twin scenario so beloved of out-of-ideas soap opera writers. Jeez Louise.

I have The Lives of Others coming to me though, so, if all reports are true, this should turn around my bad run of movies.

I finally ready Junot Díaz's novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and it is wonderful. It does feel, towards the end, like there are a few too many codas, but generally, the emotional pacing between laughter and pathos is really engaging. I'm looking forward to teaching it in the spring, I think it will be the last book we read as I think it will require the the course as foundational knowledge for making the most of it: it's very dense with references and although the footnotes provide a kind of running historical narrative to clarify and expand on the familial narrative, it will definitely benefit from cultural and historical background.

This morning, I finally turned my attention back to dissertating, after the long hiatus of app-writing and sending. I had thought my fourth chapter was going to need severe and extensive reworking--particularly in terms of my use of Agamben. I am having a small dispute with one of my committee members who thinks that I'm mishmashing the idea of the neighbor (with its concept of adjacency) and the actor (as substitute). I took up Agamben this morning to find that he refers to the neighbor as "radical substitutability." I feel relieved. Also somewhat amused to recognize that I don't exactly read Agamben, I more consult it the ways spiritualists turn to the Bible for guidance: close my eyes, let the book fall open and place my finger on the page then read what is there and consider its meaning.

In between sending off the last batch on Monday and this morning of work, these few days have felt like vacation: I get home early from school and after taking a walk in the canyon, lay in bed reading and watching movies and eating left-over stirfry. The breathing room of the open schedule makes me feel like a cowboy of time, riding freely wherever I may roam. Love it.

if you needed encouragement

to refill the birth control, the movie Private Property is just the thing.

the mistakes

So, when you have 15 chances, slim long-shots though they may be, how can you make a mistake? When you've heard the stories of search committees smirking in embarrassment for the wretched candidate who they tossed onto the reject pile for spelling errors in their cover letters, how, how can you send off a cover letter to a school you feel is really right for you, feel it in your body, as if you had a connection, a cover letter where each word vibrates with the desire to create this connection, including a sentence that you repeat. One right after the other. The same sentence. Vibrating ever more dimly in its repetition.

Michael says that mistakes happen and it's just a mistake, not a referendum on who I am as a person.

I, nonetheless, feel real bad right now. very despondent and very much wondering whether continuing on this quest is really worthwhile if I can't seem to get the things that need to be gotten right, right.

all at once

Well, there's nothing like logistical nightmares to drive out the angst.

The day after I posted my ruminations on feeling unfocused and as if my life purpose was potentially not a purpose and more of a severe craving for an ego-massage, I had a series of disasters which sent me scrambling.

Wednesday morning, I spent a solid and inspired six hours fixing my spanish writing sample. I was very much under the gun as I hoped to have my writing partners see it that evening. I was scooting around, getting ready for school, saving the doc to my jump drive, and when I came back to the computer expecting the computer to be ready for me to eject the jumpy and go on with my life, I noticed it was just sitting there, pretending to save the doc, with that little colorwheel whirling away. I restart the computer, and up pops a blue screen that won't let me login.

Dead hard drive.

I'm breathing, I'm checking online to see if there are maybe any quick fixes to this blue screen issue and sites entitled "The Blue Screen of Death" keep popping up. Still breathing but pretty scared, I pack it up and head into school where I had an adrenaline-fun 50 minutes with my students, despite my severe lack of preparation. After class, I called the dude at Mac Enthusiasts (on Pico and Manning) and when he informed me that data recovery was $400, I moved from scared to feeling helpless and hella angry. It was in this mode of bemoaning and raging against time-wasting logistics that I apparently blew right through a stop sign at LaGrange and Overland. How do I know? Because a block later after a siren went off, I realized that there was a cop trying to get me to pull over.

Moving violation.

After we all pull off in our separate directions, I start crying and not little tears trailing decorously down my adorably pink cheeks, no, but face-contorting wails ripping out of my throat. Loud. Snotty. Unhelpful.

I get to Mac Enthusiasts and wipe off my face and stump in there. Am totally uncommunicative with Matthew, front desk dude. He's pretty sure it's a hardware issue which will run me $350 to $500. We discuss the data recovery issue some more, I insist that there's nothing on this computer except one doc I really do want, he asks its name, just in case. I drive off and call babe, and while telling him that I'm going to go home, make a cup of tea and then try to reconstitute that morning's work, Matthew calls and tells me that he has my doc!

And he didn't charge me $400. Seriously, I think Matthew from Mac Enthusiasts is now one of my favoritest people of all time. If you problems with your mac, you should go there. They really are very sweet and efficient.

From there, although I had left semi-hysterical phone messages to my writing partners, one of whom I'm most certainly not close enough to justify dumping that level of incomprehensible ramblings on, I was able to meet with Neetu, have a good dinner, calm my ass down and have a productive night. But it was really too much emotional brouhaha for a single day.

Since then, it's been pretty day by day, trying to meet deadlines. I've already found some mistakes in things I've sent out. Pretty depressing. But there's really not enough time to wallow. Mental health days and nights have certainly happened, but mostly it's scoot scoot scoot scoot scoot.

Netflixed
Black Book
I thought only Hollywood movies were this obvious. Our heroine Ellis/Rachel is a creature of coincidences to the extent that I began to think of this as the Forrest Gump of Nazi/Holocaust movies. I'll back up: it's about Holland during WWII and follows one woman who loses her family because of a lawyer who was colluding with a Gestapo officer and how she survives and becomes part of the resistance, becoming a spy who falls in love with her Nazi mark who, after the Liberation, is executed according to Article 163 which allows the defeated German military to continue to enforce military law on their officers and a particularly reptilian Hauptofficer had hated her lover and wanted to personally issue the firing squad order. Meanwhile, she slowly realizes that the resistance had been infiltrated, which explains why the Nazis were always on the scene so fast but not the bumbling ragtaggery of the resistance members. Long story short (and I'm leaving out several subplots), the movie ends with her at a Kibbutz built with the loot salvaged from the Gestapo officer who had robbed the bodies of the Jews he had mowed down and bombs falling during the Six Days War.

Mostly Martha and now this. Apparently, my netflixing choices in the germanic realm are definitely not top notch. Suggestions for improvement welcome.