The mystery of their reference
well, what?
Well, for those who knew her, I should say that Tara passed last Monday. For those who didn't, I should say that Tara was my quite old dog who had been pretty sick for much of the year. She had been doing somewhat okay for a while now, but the last month or so had been increasingly hard for her. So, for that reason we shouldn't be too upset. (But the heart has reasons of its own.)
And this last week I survived--though not thrived particularly--on a diet of 5 hours of sleep a night. 25 hours of sleep for the week, I decided, was not the way I wanted to live my life.
There were two lectures this past Friday--a professor was workshopping her paper on how soul-crushing academia is (it was a fun workshop--we came to the decision that only some aspects of academic thought were really alienating); and one on the imagination of enemy in narrative, whose main thesis was that in Manichaean narratives the enemy was a Blob--that is, something unconvertible, unconvincible. But--duh. In a dualist system the enemy is Evil. However, he did have some things to say about the middle cases (the villain as having heroic-proportioned features, thus the absence of villains of a certain race was a form of racism), but what I was mostly interested in was the discussion of the unrepentant enemy as a biological enemy ("Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects... don't have politics" as Brundle-fly says). Fits in with the notion of the end of ideological conflict and the preeminence of point-of-view conflict. Which might help explain the end of the talk, which focused on Once Upon a Time in the West, with its villain played by Henry Fonda; as Daniel Sassoon (the guy giving the talk) said, "If Henry Fonda can be a villain, then anyone can, even you." In fact, if what I've read about POV taking over from politics (meaning in the 20th century, not in the last year or so), then the correct statement isn't "anyone can, even you" but "everyone is, including you."
(I doubt this is very interesting to most people out there, but I wanted to write it somewhere where it would be easily accessible by me.)
And the quarter is almost over. I think I'll take 19th Century American Gothic and Frankfurt School. Oh, also I was observed in the class I was teaching--and one of my students was not there, one of the really talkative ones--and I meet with the observer on Monday to talk about it. Oh, also, I--and this is a little early--asked three professors to be on my orals committee, which is what I spend all next year doing. I asked LB to do 19th c. American with a focus on nation-formation and comedy, horror, and melodrama--and she wrote back within a half-hour to say that she liked it. BB, whom I asked to do something 20th c. American SF--either pulp and modernism, postmodernism and new wave, or just identity and technology--is one I am a bit worried about. KW, who I asked to do a novel list on theory and practice, will probably be very busy, so I'm not sure what he'll say. I think I have something like back-ups for those two, but we'll see if I need to call them in.
Well, for those who knew her, I should say that Tara passed last Monday. For those who didn't, I should say that Tara was my quite old dog who had been pretty sick for much of the year. She had been doing somewhat okay for a while now, but the last month or so had been increasingly hard for her. So, for that reason we shouldn't be too upset. (But the heart has reasons of its own.)
And this last week I survived--though not thrived particularly--on a diet of 5 hours of sleep a night. 25 hours of sleep for the week, I decided, was not the way I wanted to live my life.
There were two lectures this past Friday--a professor was workshopping her paper on how soul-crushing academia is (it was a fun workshop--we came to the decision that only some aspects of academic thought were really alienating); and one on the imagination of enemy in narrative, whose main thesis was that in Manichaean narratives the enemy was a Blob--that is, something unconvertible, unconvincible. But--duh. In a dualist system the enemy is Evil. However, he did have some things to say about the middle cases (the villain as having heroic-proportioned features, thus the absence of villains of a certain race was a form of racism), but what I was mostly interested in was the discussion of the unrepentant enemy as a biological enemy ("Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects... don't have politics" as Brundle-fly says). Fits in with the notion of the end of ideological conflict and the preeminence of point-of-view conflict. Which might help explain the end of the talk, which focused on Once Upon a Time in the West, with its villain played by Henry Fonda; as Daniel Sassoon (the guy giving the talk) said, "If Henry Fonda can be a villain, then anyone can, even you." In fact, if what I've read about POV taking over from politics (meaning in the 20th century, not in the last year or so), then the correct statement isn't "anyone can, even you" but "everyone is, including you."
(I doubt this is very interesting to most people out there, but I wanted to write it somewhere where it would be easily accessible by me.)
And the quarter is almost over. I think I'll take 19th Century American Gothic and Frankfurt School. Oh, also I was observed in the class I was teaching--and one of my students was not there, one of the really talkative ones--and I meet with the observer on Monday to talk about it. Oh, also, I--and this is a little early--asked three professors to be on my orals committee, which is what I spend all next year doing. I asked LB to do 19th c. American with a focus on nation-formation and comedy, horror, and melodrama--and she wrote back within a half-hour to say that she liked it. BB, whom I asked to do something 20th c. American SF--either pulp and modernism, postmodernism and new wave, or just identity and technology--is one I am a bit worried about. KW, who I asked to do a novel list on theory and practice, will probably be very busy, so I'm not sure what he'll say. I think I have something like back-ups for those two, but we'll see if I need to call them in.