New Outside Reader

On a dissertation committee in my department, you must have 3 departmental readers and 1 reader outside the department. My current outside reader is a poor soul in the Art Department, but my project has evolved to the extent that it is well afield of what this woman knows.

So what's a person to do? Reach out. I wrote an email to the author of my currently favorite scholarly text and asked him to be my reader. And, folks, he said yes!

I'm not especially good at this sort of thing, so I'm pretty excited that Dr. Singer agreed to participate. He said that my project "looks very interesting," and he thinks that it'll possibly help him prepare for a course he wants to teach. All to the good. 

Seeing problems

I'm thrilled that Obama won, but now that it's Thursday (2 days after the historical victory of the spirit of our great country), I'm back to thinking about me. I'll bring it back around to the political, so bear with me.

When I was a very small girl, I had night-terrors. I would wake my parents, my father would try to soothe me with milk and tales of tryptophan, and then he would send me off to bed. They eventually got a little impatient with that routine. So I got into the habit of getting myself out of bed, drinking some milk, and reading on the living room couch.

One night (I was probably around 8), I awoke from a nightmare, and we were out of milk. I got my book, but feeling especially sorry for myself, I sat on the couch and cried. The sobbing woke my father, and for some reason, I didn't want to tell him why I was sad. Instead I blamed it on the book. (In retrospect, the book, The Secret Garden, may have set the mood.) He took it away from me and sent me back to bed. I assigned fault to the book, and my father accepted that assignment. (The truth came out later. That night and others like it were nascent expressions of what came to be my mental illness.) No matter why I lied—shame, my need to please, their demand for me to be perfect—this memory strikes me as a metonym for the lies my family used about my true need for help.

I don't raise this specter of self-pity to simply rile your emotion. Rather, it's a micronic (not a word but should be) analog of what we as Americans do as a nation. We lie to each other about the "housing bubble," say, then the bad mortgages, then the interest rates, even as they compile upon adjacent economic injuries. Only crisis draws enough truth around itself, and by doing so is revealed.

As we celebrate President Elect Obama—it feels so good to write that phrase—we hope to wait for him to take office so that he can address what's happening in our country and in the world. Will we lie to each other or will we point to the tide of the next crisis? Can we even see it yet? Where is the child, the book, the father? Let me say that I have great confidence in Obama's leadership. Having a post-Boomer, Black president should cause us joy, but may it not blind us to his need to please and our demand for his perfection. May it not blind us to our continuing moral problems, both at home, abroad, and in those nebulous, lawless plots of land we refuse to claim as our own. May the smug enjoyment of our right choice not deflect our insight: Electing Obama does not make America virtuous. It simply makes us better.

So, here's the deal

I think I might have a defensible thesis statement for my dissertation. Now I have some tasks in front of me. I need to:

• Define slapstick, modernity, modernism, and their relationship
• Discuss how people's bodies were affected by modernity
• Develop some ideas about slapstick and what it requires of the spectator
• Figure out how to incorporate new information into an existing theory of how we watch movies
• Determine how spectators can distance themselves enough from the screen action to laugh at violence
• Trace the ways that chance affects slapstick and its responses to technology, pace, immediacy, and gender
• Cobble this all together to make an overarching argument for a counter-history of slapstick, and thus call into question how film theorists think about film history
• Make a list of example films

I have about a year to a year and a half. It'll be fun, in its way. But I'd rather watch Chaplin's The Rink (1916) over and over.

Thank god I have Sam. Without him, it would be a year of eating only ice cream sandwiches and other ice cream-based foods, apples and peanut butter, and Sonic milkshakes, which I guess should count more as an ice cream-based food than its own special category. At any rate, hurrah for Sam!

Imagine, now, a clearing of the throat

I have nothing to say. That sentence is obviously not true and should signal to you that I'm going to whine now.

Everywhere I start to begin goes poorly. It's like trying to force your way into a scrum, or so I imagine. Three places to begin: the theory, the history, the (or a) film. I've already got my appropriate introductory quotation at least. (In critical writing, it's customary to put an interesting quotation at the beginning of an essay so that the reader can at least have a little fun.)

In any of the ten files I've created, after a page or so, the cursor just blinks. A blinking cursor may be the saddest thing in the world. Blink. Blink. k.

First, do no harm.

Released in 2001, A Beautiful Mind still makes me angry. I bring it up because Netflix keeps suggesting that I take another look at it. In terms of craft, the film is lovely to look at, and the actors do their jobs. And I don't really care if it remains true to the events of Nash's life. What angers me is its fantasy about schizophrenia and the old saw about mad genius. Critics and viewers alike laud this movie for offering a glimpse into the experience of having serious mental illness. Isn't it pretty to think so.

(For bonus points, name the allusion.)

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In other news, last night M asked me about how a person determines whether a poem is good. I talked a little too long about "One Art," then said that it's easier to show with a selection of poems, rather than a list of qualities. Our conversation makes me think about how I approach teaching poetry in 102. I don't care for the approach lampooned Dead Poets' Society---I'm not going to make a bunch of graphs. But I do believe that one can tell whether a poem has merit. As a pedagogue, I try to make the concepts we talk about as concrete as possible (e.g., handouts for 6 steps to a good thesis statement, 12 steps to a close reading, 6 right ways to use commas). Students like lists and handouts. So, it's not enough for me just to say that these 10 poems we've read are excellent because I say so and anything with 14 lines is a sonnet, no matter what anyone else says.

Poetry is a long and vibrant mode, such that its forms, variations, and ambiguities are much more difficult to quantify than any more recent form (e.g., novels). A traditional Shakespearian sonnet contains 14 lines of iambic pentameter, organized into three 4-line stanzas and a couplet, with a standard rhyme scheme, and a turn of some kind at the end, usually somewhere in the last 4 lines.

Using this description of the form, a person can still write a poem that will make your eyes and ears bleed. In fact, that's the most likely outcome. (Ooh!) It's like giving a person who has never cooked a bare-bones recipe for hollandaise sauce or pastry creme. Something's going break.

So I don't think I can write a list of elements to look for in a great poem. I can only repeat what has been said to me: Great poems are revelatory. They don't conform. Here's a list of terms you can use to talk about poems. Now let's look at one. 

Wilfred Owen (written between two tours in WWI. He himself became one of these youth just before the war ended.)

Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen. 

(He died in WWI a week before Armistice Day.)

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,

Nor any voice of mourning, save the choirs,----

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.