A quick update:
I took Clarabelle to the vet this morning for a chest x-ray. I saw a different vet today–the one I don't really like–and he said, "You know what? If the x-ray's clear, I'm just gonna take it out." Um, uh… okay? He thinks there's only a very small chance that it's malignant. Keep those fingers (and paws) crossed that he's right.
I sat by a bearded woman on the bus ride home.
I left the vet Monday afternoon carrying nearly 20 pounds of cat. Call me weak, but the kitties were too heavy to walk more than a few dozen yards. Clarabelle is pretty subdued in her carrier, but Monte wriggles around, sticking his paws out at passersby and generally making himself difficult to hang on to. I set them down on the sidewalk and called for a cab (the cabbies don't make regular rounds of Hyde Park like they do downtown or in the northern neighborhoods).
A bunch of teenagers sauntered by. I was wary and inched out of their way, moving the cat carriers so that they were directly in front of me and well away from the group of teens. When I worked at McBookstore (right across the street from the vet), teenagers–unaffectionately referred to by McBookstore employees as "the gangs"–used the store as an after school hangout of sorts, sometimes leering and swearing, sometimes sitting on stacks of books, talking and laughing loudly in their tight clusters. Those teenagers at McBookstore, like the ones on the corner, were all African-American. It wasn't about race, we said at McBookstore, it was that they were loud, they were rude, they made the bookstore uncomfortable for paying customers. Paying customers who were, incidentally, mostly black.
These kids on the street corner were as loud and obnoxious as the ones at McBookstore. They took up the entire sidewalk. Anybody in their path was invisible; they moved in a large but tightly knit circle, sauntering with the easy confidence of the streetwise, egging each other on with loud words I could not understand.
An older white man edged around the group, came up to me and said, "And they wonder why some people look down on them!"
* * *
In his essay "Black Skins, White Masks," Frantz Fanon asks, "Where am I to be classified? Or, if you prefer, tucked away? … Where shall I hide?" He turned to others. "The Negro is an animal," he heard. "The Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly." Here on 53rd Street, that is what white people see. Mean and bad and ugly. And loud and obnoxious. Fanon says that "not only must the black man be black, he must be black in relation to the white man." It doesn't matter whether I'm racist or not, whether I'm pale-white or olive-white. It doesn't even matter if I'm judging them only for being loud and for taking up the whole sidewalk. I'm white, they're black. And on that street corner, like it or not, I'm one of the white people. I'm like that elderly white man.
The white man returned from his errand, and unlocked his off-white Toyota. I was still standing on the corner, waiting for my cab. The teenagers were still loud, still sauntering in their large circle. The man turned to me. "You need a ride somewhere in the neighborhood?"
* * *
current book: The New York Times recently reviewed The Places in Between by Rory Stewart. For now, at least, you can read it here. I was excited to read the review because the title is so similar to my thesis–until the reviewer refers to it as "a pipsqueak title." Hmph. The rest of the description was alluring enough to immediately purchase it, and I'll be starting it tonight or tomorrow.
current music: I'm back to listening to Entre Rios' Onda.
current socks: black with white and yellow bumblebees
In winter quarter, Advisor and one of my non-fiction peers–both native South Siders–were discussing Chicago writer Billy Lombardo, who had recently published a book of short stories called The Logic of a Rose. The are loosely based on Lombardo's own experiences growing up in Bridgeport, the South Side neighborhood that is home to the Daleys and the World Champion White Sox.
One of them described the stories as being "too saccharine," but admitted that Lombardo's observations of the blue-collar neighborhood were sensitive and sharp. In one story, Lombardo says that you can never tell when a storm is coming in Bridgeport. "No one could smell a storm before it clocked him in the eye." Both native South Siders agreed as though they had just realized Lombardo was right.
Despite the warnings of it being over-sweetened, I was intrigued, and I bought the book. I haven't had time to read it yet, and I only just recently skimmed the table of contents to see what awaited me. I immediately turned to page 61, where the story "The Hills of Laura" began. It's exactly what you're thinking:
"And there they were, Petey, Laura's breasts. In these very hands. They were perfect," he said. "They were…" And Matty closed his eyes. He needed to put Laura's breasts into words that I would believe. He closed his eyes, and he held out his hands, palms facing me, as if he couldn't find the words in his head to compare to breasts, but maybe he could find them with his hands.
"Little hills, they were, Petey. The hills of Laura," he said, and he opened his eyes, and he looked at me to see if I understood, but I guess he could tell that I didn't.
* * *
I took both kitties to the vet today. They both needed shots, and Clarabelle had a swollen "hill" that needed to be looked at. The vet noticed it when she had her late-term abortion last month, but thought it might be hormonal and might go away post-abortion. It hasn't. And, in the vet's words today, "it doesn't feel good." We won't know for sure if it's cancerous until a chest x-ray and lumpectomy, but some quick internet research shows that mammary tumors in cats are almost aways malignant (like– 85-90%), and that the morbidity rate is fairly high. Right now, I'm simply not dealing with it. I lost my two childhood pets in October, and I'm unprepared to lose another pet, even though she's only been in my life since Easter.
Please keep your fingers crossed for the hills of Clarabelle, and for Monte, who has found the love of his life.
I was thinking the other day about the great unknown that stretches ahead of me, and how it might be nice to approach it with some specific goals in mind. You know how people always ask you, "well, if money wasn't an object, what would you be doing?" That seems like a well-organized way to daydream. I usually respond that I'd like to freelance, but a) if that's possible at all, it's a long long way off, and b) it's pretty vague. So I started making a mental list of Things To Do Before I Turn 30. Goals require deadlines, you know. I thought the list should try to merge personal and professional goals. The first two things on my list? "Learn to surf" and "Adopt a dog." I believe "write some really good shit" came in at number three, but by then I was already daydreaming about running along the beach with a mutt by my side.
Is this what I meant by the Academy changing my life?
* * *
current book: um. Heidegger & Adorno. I've seriously never procrastinated like this. I both desperately want to be done with it and desperately want to never finish.
current music: the sound of the kitties thundering through the house. thank goodness the guy below us moved out.
current socks: bowling socks! in addition to bowling balls & pins, there are comic strip-like exclamations that say "Strike!" and "Spare!" I attended a graduation party today that featured croquet, and these were the closest I could come. They're both ball sports, right?
* * *
I walked over to Harper Quadrangle this afternoon and watched about an hour of the graduation ceremony, long enough to watch my classmates graduate. I don't regret my decision not to walk–I'm not comfortable being in the spotlight, even if it's for only .05 seconds. And really, if I don't get to wear a long white dress or curtsy, what's the point? I'm glad I went, though, because the caps and gowns the PhDs wear are a sight to behold. Poofy hats, bars, hoods… I was maybe a little jealous. Also, the convocation program lists the dissertation titles of all graduating PhDs. My favorites: "'In His Hand Is a Sceptre of Fire and a Veil Is Spread before Him': Pirke de-Rabbie Eliezer and the Exposition of Medieval Midrash" and "Faster Markov Chain Monte Carlo Algorithms for the Permanent and Binary Contingency Tables," the latter mostly because it has my cat's name in it.
And now… one more paper to write. And then a job to find.
* * *
current book: this weekend is all about Heidegger and Adorno
current music: still stuck on Isabelle Antena
current socks: none, even though it was quite chilly today. but I painted my toes cha-ching cherry.
I just finished my penultimate paper for grad school. My final paper (on Heidegger & Adorno) is due on Monday, and graduation is tomorrow. I'm skipping the awards brunch and the graduation ceremony, although I might swing by to watch some of my classmates graduate. The problem is that it's a University graduation, which means that my peers will be graduating alongside everybody from the med school to the social sciences. If I'm really lucky, I'll be able to hear the announcements from my apartment, and then I can gauge what time to walk over. Otherwise, it's hours and hours of sweaty boredom.
Nevertheless, it feels a little anti-climatic to be skipping the graduation events. I'd like to attend the brunch if only to find out who won the thesis awards (it's been made pretty clear that I won't be one of them, so I'm not that excited about it), but two hours by myself in a roomful of everybody and their parents… yeah, I can live without it. And the ceremony, well, "sweat" and "boredom" just about sum it up. I hardly remember my college graduation (which might have something to do with having stayed up the night before, but might also have something to do with the commencement speaker, who was some doctor who appears on Good Morning America. A couple years after I graduated, they got Billy Collins. How is that fair?). Maybe hanging out in my air-conditioned apartment isn't so anti-climactic after all.
* * *
current book: Art Spiegelman's Maus, especially those instances in which I can find good examples of the Bakhtinian concept of the creative chronotope and the inseparability of space and time.
current music: Isabelle Antena.
current socks: none, on account of it being a lovely 80 degrees, but lots and lots of bandaids to cover up my blistered and bruised feet. word of advice: don't dance for three hours in high heels. my feet will never be the same.
Or maybe just an empty closet.
Back to paper-writing. Something about the temporality of experience and how graphic novels are like both fiction and film …
For those of you who are just here for the cute cat pictures, here’s some candy for you:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn1Qna-Ni3o]
* * *
I am in the midst of paper-writing hell. As though I haven’t already suffered enough? In some ways it’s a lesser circle of hell than my thesis was, because I don’t feel the same kind of pressure, but these are critical papers, and, as Advisor made clear, critical thinking is not exactly my forte (yes, there is a pity pool in hell, and I reserve the right to splash in it as needed, at least for a little bit longer). I am trying to answer this question for my first paper:
In his discussion of “The Central Region,” P. Adams Sitney argues that–despite the autonomy the film grants the image–Snow’s film is, ultimately, a metaphor for consciousness. Making use of Ricoeur’s account of the fundamental aporia between cosmic time and phenomenological time (the time of consciousness), discuss the plausibility of Sitney’s claim. In what way(s) is the specificity of film implicated here?
Michael Snow’s “The Central Region” is 190 minutes–that’s over THREE HOURS, folks–of a pre-programmed camera sweeping over the bare landscape of Quebec’s La Region Centrale. The camera motions are choreographed with excruciating, baroque motions: it begins with the camera pointed straight at the ground, wherein it begins a slow spiral (and I mean SLOW–it takes a full 33 minutes) into the horizon. This is only one of about sixteen different “dances,” all of which are equally painful to watch. The film is accompanied only by a series of beeps that sounds a bit like a phone ringing in the distance, and which made me quite anxious. After about the first hour I stopped anticipating a narrative–really, any narrative would have sufficed–and just surrendered to the pain.
Second paper topic:
Compare Heidegger’s notion about the entanglement between art, artist and artwork with Adorno’s later essay about the art and the arts, which answers Heidegger.
I actually really enjoy Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” which describes that entanglement, but I’m much less confident about Adorno. And my ego’s pretty bruised and doesn’t really want to tackle any more essays about art. As sad as I’ve been about the end of grad school, that light at the end of the tunnel is looking better and better.
* * *
current book: see above
current music: I made a little mix that I kind of love. It starts with DJ Shadow’s “Building Steam With a Grain of Salt” and ends with Calexico’s cover of “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and includes two gems by the recently-discovered (by me) Isabelle Antena. I normally never put the same artist twice on the same mix, but she’s worth it.
current socks: now that it’s officially flip-flop weather, I’m not sure what to fill this space with. any suggestions?
