south of the loop

My roommate is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Cinema/Media Studies Department. She’s also very interested in gender issues, and is currently working on a project about intersex people. She’s interviewed several intersex people (commonly known as hermaphrodites; I think “intersex” is the preferred term or the self-designation). Now, she and a colleague are putting together a short stop-motion film. I’m not entirely sure how the interviews and research will fit into this film. All I know is that there is now a hot pink clay penis in my refrigerator.

[Note: My digital camera isn't working, so the best we could do was get a still from the movie of Roommate's friend making the penis. If I can figure out how to fix my camera, I will snap a picture of the penis inside the fridge.]

* * *

current book: Nearly done with Goodbye, Columbus. Apparently this was Roth’s attempt at a novel while a grad student at the U of C. Sort of makes my master’s thesis look a bit paler…

current music: Can’t stop listening to Margot and the Nuclear So-and-So’s. Also, no matter what I do, I cannot get ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’s “White and Nerdy” out of my head. That song is a serious earworm.

current socks: Smartwools with polypropylene liners underneath them and lined boots above them. And still my toes are cold. I have never been cold like this before. Not when I lived in Indianapolis, not when I lived in Massachusetts. I am seriously considering moving to the desert. Give me 100+ temperatures any day.

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A character on a sitcom says to his brother regarding his new, too-young girlfriend, “Don’t bring her around here! This is where fun comes to die!” You respond aloud, “NO! That’s the University of Chicago!”

*     *     *

current book: Alright, who’s gonna suggest something else for me to read? Maybe I’ll move Moby-Dick to my bedside so I can lighten my load and still (slowly) plug through it.

current music: I’m lost in a dream and I don’t know which way to run. Yeah, I’ve had “Straight Up” stuck in my head all damn day.

current socks: Light green with an assortment of Christmasy things on them, like wreaths, holly, snowflakes, and reindeer who wear scarves.

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…one of the magazines offered at the gym is JAMA.

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In line at Fifth Third Bank during lunch to deposit a handful of checks.

clerk: You wanted … some money back?

me: Yes, $40.

clerk: Do you have your ID with you?

me: Yes. Wait, no. I just have my school ID. Is that okay?

I hand him my University of Chicago ID card and give him my social security number so he can verify the account.

clerk, looking at my deposit slip: How much did you want back?

me: Forty dollars.

clerk: Um. Your math’s a little off.

me, trying to be cute and nonchalant at the same time: Mmm. That doesn’t surprise me.

clerk: According to this … you want $310 back.

* * *

current book: Finished Magellan on the Metra home. Will begin DeLillo’s The Body Artist tomorrow morning. I also purchased Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day today. It’s worth having a hard copy of.

current music: After listening to Os Mutantes’ first album three times in a row this morning, I couldn’t find anything that hit the spot. I’m tempted to listen to Calexico nonstop, but I don’t want too much of a good thing. So I bounced from Cat Power to The Clientele back to Os Mutantes.

current socks: A friend just gave me a pair of socks she got for me in Japan. They are white crew socks with black cats all over them, and the turquoise toes are divided in two… so that you can wear them with flip flops. Maybe I’ll do just that and tell everybody it’s a Japanese trend that I’m on the cutting edge of.

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I met my workout buddy at Ratner, the U of C gym, on Saturday morning. Neither of us had any idea that the Ratner pool was the site of the swimming events for the Gay Games. Every stereotype about gay men? In the flesh. In large numbers. Cute gay boys prancing and strutting about in darling little Speedos–many of which sported flowers or swirlies. We saw several men wearing t-shirts or sweatshirts that said, “KY LIQUID SWIMMERS.” The pièce de résistance, the crème de la crème? A cute gay boy in a Speedo and a cowboy hat prancing about by the pool.

As we left the gym, a man ran up to us and offered us free bottles of water. I took mine and exclaimed, “There’s even a rainbow on the water bottle!” The man responded, “Well, we want everybody to know that not all Christians hate gay people.” A noble cause, indeed!

The Jesus Water (so named by my Jewish workout buddy) has a website on its label: www.myfreewater.com. Take a look, if you dare. I took the quiz that determined that I am neither a good person nor good enough to get into Heaven. The “lakes of fire” were mentioned. Apparently even gay Christians like a little fire and brimstone.

Is staring at this considered “lustful,” even if it’s just admiration of the human body? Even though we both like boys?

* * *

current book: Sweet Thursday. About 60 pages into it and I neither hate nor love it. I’m still not convinced it will change my mind about Steinbeck, but it’s good enough to keep me (mostly) open-minded.
current music: “Busby Berkeley Dreams” by The Magnetic Fields. “I should have forgotten you long ago / but you’re in every song I know.”
current socks: it’s definitely sandal/flip-flop weather. But I am very excited to wear the socks Julie just sent me–the watermelons in particular. The tops of the socks are red with watermelon seeds printed on them, and the sides and bottoms are the green rind. You can bet I’m going to wear them with my green Keens so that they form the rind. Yes. I am the biggest dork ever.

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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?

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* * *

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.

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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.

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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?

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Compare and contrast the spatialization of time at work in Maus and in Time Code. How is it similar in the two media? How different? Please be very concrete in answering.

I just wrote a five page mini-paper answering this question, so I hope that I do actually understand the spatialization of time, at least as it pertains to Maus and Time Code. But even if I got that right, there are lots of other things I don't understand, for instance, Husserl and Ricoeur. A sample passage from volume three of Ricoeur's Time and Narrative, from a chapter entitled "Husserl Confronts Kant," which sounds far more aggressive and exciting than it actually is:

There is no confusion here between space and time, contrary to what Bergson thought, but the movement from the intuition (unobservable as such) of time to the representation of a determined time, through reflection on the operation of drawing a line. Among all the determinations of space, the line has the advantage of conferring an external character of representation.

And on and on he goes.

As much as I make fun of the crackademics here (which is of course rooted in jealousy, since I only wish I could do it), I am very much IN DENIAL about the end of grad school. As in … I still don't know when it actually ends. Very, very soon. That's all I know. I'm too scared to look at my syllabi to figure out exactly how soon. What I don't understand about graduate school is why it has to end. It's not just the awesome student schedule that I've succumbed to, or the time I've had to write and think, or everything I've learned about theory and why I suck at it. It's not even the fear I have at re-entering the working world. It's all of those things plus the realization–the realization that I knew I would have, but still, that aha! moment grabs you by surprise–at how much I've changed these past nine months. The realization that I think differently, I look at the world differently, I write differently. Strangely, this aha! moment came after the MAPH booze cruise (you can see a few pictures on Flickr), where I rediscovered my love of gin and tonics and partied like a rock star on Lake Michigan. It wasn't the alcohol, I promise, it was the fact that MAPH sponsors such a spectacular event–I mean, open bar on the Lake for three hours, watching fireworks on the shore? That's pretty incredible. It's like they know we need something that big to end our year with. Nothing else would befit the tremendous changes that we've undergone. Nothing smaller would do.

So now I have three more papers to write, a reading of creative theses to attend/participate in, and a precept barbecue to attend. And I'll get a grade and comments on my thesis this Wednesday.

And then it's over.

* * *

current book: honestly? I can't stop reading my thesis. Partly in awe and denial that I'm finished, and partly because the type-A part of my personality can't stop combing it for typoes.
current music: two things: Ozomatli's album Street Signs, and a song by Entre Rios called "Claro Que Si," which you can (and should!) listen to here. Somehow it makes me unbearably sad and it makes me want to get up and dance. Beat that.
current socks: dark blue with all things Western on them, such as cowboy boots, a matching Western shirt and skirt, a cowboy hat and…. a cow-spotted bikini. because that's what I always think of when I think of the West. THANKS, Laura and Mark! These are fantastic!

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