Just for fun, here is one of the places I wrote about in my Krakauer post. I didn’t include it there because I didn’t want it commingling with all the movie stills and catching some kind of Hollywood cooties.
One of those dogs is mine.
Archive for the 'Film' Category
Thanks for the suggestions so far on my Summer reading list. Keep ‘em coming!
I am here only briefly, so that I can report having finished Krakauer’s Into the Wild, which I enjoyed very much indeed. I was writing a post about it, but I wound up discussing the film as well, so I put it on the media blog. Here it is.
Still plugging away at the Eggers, which is quite long and, I have to say, hasn’t won me over yet. Usually Eggers doesn’t have to win me over! My default setting is “LOVE EGGERS.” I guess we’ll see if anything great happens in the next 300 (gulp!) pages.
I hosted a Big Lebowski party this past weekend, and I happen to have a shitload of milk, kahlua, and vodka left over. This is quite lucky, because it means that, after a long morning of conferences and then a long afternoon of trying to get the students to discuss incredibly dense Modernist-Surrealist-Revolutionary poetry, I can relax at home with a few Caucasians (minus the Cremora and roofies, of course).
If you have ever had a job that involved talking all goddamned day long, you might know what I mean when I say that at the end of such a day, you start to feel a little woozy and hallucinatory as the sound of your own voice reverberates and echoes and wiggles around inside our already fragile cranium. I spent the morning uttering the same suggestions to student after student after chowderheaded jerkburger student as they each came into my office and sat around whining about how haaaard this assignment was, and how it was so much haaaaarder than the pervious one. I’m all, “Um, yeah, the assignments do get progressively more complex as the semester goes by, and if you thought the second out of five was too hard, then let me tell you, YOU ARE FUCKED.” Dear dog.
Then, to talk about difficult poetry for three hours after all that…well, ugh, my brain is fried. Fried and crispy and salty and delicious, and full of thoughts of dinner and sleep.
Good thing I have tomorrow “off,” which merely means I will spend tomorrow grading, reading, planning, researching, and proctoring make-up exams. Day “off,” my ass.
It’s been another long week in New Wye, what with the teaching and the reading and the grading and the hey-hey-it-hoits-me, as Professor Frink would say. I am thinking about making Frink my role model in all things professorial. No one can say that is a bad idea. Mahoyven.
Life has generally been good, with the exception of a few minor annoyances. For example, all of my debit, credit, and ATM cards seem to expire all at the same time, and let me tell you it is near impossible to get your bank to mail you the proper replacement card to the proper address and bother to include a PIN. Impossible. This never would have happened had Parallel-Universe Me (the excellent bank employee) been somehow running things at all the various financial institutions involved. Thankfully for my sanity, though (but not for my convenience), there is no such thing as Parallel-Universe Me; there is only This Me, and This Me gave up the banking gig a long time ago.
School has been as busy as humanly possible, and the thought of “time for research” makes me either want to laugh or cry till I piss my pants. Research! Feh! There is only time to be moderately prepared for class, at best. This is why it is wise that I have decided to make one of my classes a film class: film screenings do not take much prep time on my part. I just have to put the film on my Netflix queue and sit on my duff waiting for it to be delivered. And on that note, have you seen Hoop Dreams? If not, you should. I know next to nothing about basketball, and am generally at best a one-sport lady, making time for the Red Sox and the Mariners, maybe, and that’s about it. Nonetheless, I find this documentary to be completely compelling and at times heart-wrenching. You should watch it. It will change your mind about a lot of things, the entertainment value of documentary film least among them.
I have hope for a lot of my students — some of them have really been impressing me so far, so I am looking forward to reading their papers. Some of them, however, have already been giving me the stink eye. You know that look that spells This is a Required Class and I Have to Take it but I Don’t Have to Like It? That look? Well, they have that look tattooed across their faces, where normal human expressions should be. Speaking of tattoos, one of the Stink Eye kids asked me out of nowhere the other day whether I had any tattoos, “because, like, [her] other, like, English Teacher Lady had all kinds of tattoos,” and I couldn’t decide whether to tell her sternly that that was a completely inappropriate question, punch her in the face, or show her my tattoo and ask her if she didn’t think it was, like, so totally bitchen. But then I remembered that kids these days don’t know the meaning of the word “bitchen,” literally or figuratively, so I opted for the face punching. I expect a stern memo from the dean any day now.
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