May

12

Now that’s what I call democracy!

May 12, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Go vote for the Chosen One: USPS Jedi Master

I’ll be honest and say I voted for Darth Vader. What can I say? I’m a purist with my modern mythology, and in the Joseph Campbell sense, he is the hero of the series–not just the last 3 prequels but the whole thing as an arc. It’s only right that he’s the representative of the story in this little slice of history trivia, too.

Speaking of history: About a month ago, I took my students through the introduction to the Declaration of Independence and promised that I’d give a copy of the full text to anyone who was interested. Only one guy expressed interest at the time, but last week two others asked about it. Next week’s lesson will be on essay writing basics, so I think I’m going to go out on a limb, bring in the full text, maybe some more reading-level-appropriate supporting/explanation materials (my students are grade levels 4-early 6, the text alone is a little intense for that–and, hell, for plenty of people in college, too) and ask them to get together a small paper on it. It’s a step and a half above the regular worksheets and writing assignments, but I am a classic American history geek and if they’re interested, I’m happy to integrate more Revolution-era texts into the lessons as we go along.

Anyway, what a week. Wow. I’ve just been trying to keep it together. I’ve also been listening to the most horrid and entertaining Mexican rap since cinco de mayo, and it seems unlikely that this trend will stop anytime soon. Clearly Inwood is rubbing off on me. But hey, at least it’s not the particularly atrocious reggaeton they’re always blasting on the streets out here. I’m not that far gone yet.

I finished The Testament of Gideon Mack this week and have to take a minute here to highly recommend it. It’s a sly, funny and insightful look into how faith and belief work (differently and dangerously) in our communities and in our minds. I empathized a lot with Gideon, for his constant confusion, his need for sense and order, his simultaneously false and quixotically earnest insistence on telling the truth about his experiences as he understood them. It’s anything but a beach read, but it will suck you in. If you’ve got time this summer, pick it up and check it out.

May

7

false advertising!

May 7, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Somebody tell me how it’s fair to use this title:
Muslim-Christian soccer tie scrapped after sex row
…to trick people into reading a perfectly boring and predictable article about Muslim imams refusing to play a team including women priests at soccer?
Dash my hopes for something more interesting in the news today than Paris going to jail, why don’t they.

I did appreciate the part about the “special feelings,” though. Believe me, nothing will help people take your faith seriously like using the language of an elementary school “intro to sex ed” lesson to explain why you can’t play with girls.

Anyway, happy belated cinco de mayo to everyone. I hope you all drank quite a bit of tequila and shot a few Frenchmen to keep in with the holiday spirit. There was a very successful house party here in Inwood for the 5th, and although it killed any hope I had for being productive on Sunday, it was more than worth the sacrifice. I also have leftover tamales from now until probably next year. That’s also for the best–they took a whole weekend to cook and I won’t be doing that again anytime soon.

May

3

On Clytaemnestra

May 3, 2007 | Leave a Comment

It’s been a while since college, but I’d still very much like to get this book, along with a huge chunk of time to really read it: Reclaiming Klytemnestra.

Klytemnestera, Klaitemnestra, Clytemnestra, Clytaemnestra (my preferred spelling), whatever, is still the most fascinating literary character I’ve encountered to this day. She’s an almost archetypical badass–she ruled a nation while its king was out getting his men slaughtered for a decade at Troy, she kept her lover/accomplice-of-convenience under her thumb but around for show and practical concerns. She waited patiently for ten years to avenge her daughter, and the same hour the opportunity presented itself, she wrapped her truant husband in a big sheet and took an axe to the loser. She was the twin (some say half-twin, depends on your myth) sister of Helen “the destroyer” of Troy and shared in just as much tragedy, but refused victimhood even when she was finally slaughtered by her own son. It’s hard to get much tougher than that.

But that’s not what’s most interesting about her. Clytaemnestra is just as fascinating a woman for her role as a mother and a wife, a woman wronged and a woman in power. Agamemnon killed not one, but two of her children (he slaughtered her firstborn, the infant child of her first husband, at the same time as he dispatched said first husband and brought Cly home as a wife/war prize), and abandoned her to an unstable city crumbling under the weight of its own age and old, counterproductive traditions. She took the reins and took control, and had to make some incredibly difficult decisions in the process–sending Orestes away to quell the threat he presented as he grew, alienating (but not, despite some claims, evidently abusing) Electra by having an extended affair in front of her in Agamemnon’s absence. When she’s finally defeated, it isn’t when Orestes kills her. Read the stories–she keeps on keepin’ on, although in a much angrier and more vengeful aspect than before. It’s at the very end of the Oresteia, when the gods decide (on some pretty arbitrary moral considerations and patently false biological ones) that a child’s loyalty is to a father alone. That’s when Clytaemnestra’s spirit really loses the fight. But she stays with us–with me, anyway–as a character, for what she did and didn’t do inside her life.

Anyway, this tangent has nothing to do with anything going on in my life right now, other than the fact that in a different world I might have become an academic, and that we should all be happy that we live in this world instead. Someday I might write a book about Clytaemnestra myself, but I promise it won’t be for a while. In the meantime, I’d just like to read that one.

Apr

21

Horoscopes and progress

April 21, 2007 | Leave a Comment

I’m not exactly a believer, but I do subscribe to the Tarot.com’s “horoscopes of the day.” 6 times out of 10, they give me generic good advice that it seems prudent to remember no matter what kind of day I’m really going to have. 3-5 times out of 10 (and this overlaps with the six once in a while), they come across as condescending, overcautious and annoying. And once in a very great while, they’re so dead-spot-on that it’s actually a little bit weird.

Like this week. This week, the general trend of my daily advice has been to keep up the pace, but don’t overdo it–things are going to fall into place. And that’s exactly what happened. I worked myself into a frenzy–excluding Thursday, when some kind of mystery bug knocked me out of the ring–and got a ton of stuff done, at work and in general. And then some nice things just came to me out of the blue. Totally kept my goals in order, too:

  • - I went to the gym twice, once for cycling and once for kickboxing (my legs are still not speaking to me), and just took a walk all around Ft. Tryon park, which is quickly turning into a weekend routine of mine. I’ve been trying to figure out roughly how long that walk is. It takes me a while to circle it, but there are lots of hills and I’m not exactly in a rush (and even if I was, I’ve got short legs and I’m pretty slow), so who knows.
  • - I got a very promising voicemail regarding goal #1.
  • - I got a reasonably interesting query email regarding goal #16
  • - I did some creative writing. Just a little bit, a snippet of what might be a short story, but it’s on the list so it does count for something.
  • - In spite of the long hours and sickness, I did get to spend time with people.

I went and saw a late-night showing of Grindhouse with a few folks yesterday. It was a lot of fun. Have I mentioned here yet how much I love Robert Rodriguez? If not, he’s one of my favorites. I hear (and IMDB supports the rumor) that he actually got the backing to make his “fake trailer” for Planet Terror, “Machete,” into an actual film. It looks like pure borderland kitsch, which is what he does best. You’d better believe I’ll be there opening night. You are all invited to come.

I’ve got no real beef with Tarantino, either. I like the Kill Bill movies and Pulp Fiction of course, and even Reservoir Dogs if I’m in a certain mood. But Rodriguez is definitely my favorite.

In other entertainment news, one of my current books is The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud, which tracks the halting progress of a band of obliviously spoiled and self-absorbed late 20’s/early 30’s culture junkies in New York over the early part of 2001. I didn’t spend much time in the city before the world she’s talking about effectively imploded, between the economy’s downturn and the strong cultural catalyst of 9/11. But that world didn’t entirely die, and it’s all so familiar. I’m very much enjoying the book, and I guiltily despise all of the characters to different degrees. Not because they’re overtly bad people–coddled and arrogant and exasperating, maybe, but too familiar to me to be outside of my sympathy. Really, I think I react so strongly to these characters because I recognize the very worst of myself and my friends in each of them. I’m rooting for them even as my patience with all of them is running below empty. It’s a lot like life in this town, actually. So on that score, the book definitely gets points for realism.

On that note, I’m going to be busy tomorrow, so today is an off day. I took my walk in the park, I bought groceries, I talked to my sister, I read a bit and now I’m going to make empanadas. I can never make anything with a crust turn out well for me, but I keep trying because I’m stupid or stubborn or both. Wish me luck.

Apr

15

Quotes of the moment

April 15, 2007 | Leave a Comment

This came up on my Google Quotes today:

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.” - Samuel Johnson

I’ve been thinking lately about the internet, and all the little idiosyncrasies of psychology and attitude that make up the gap between those who use it and those who don’t. I almost typed “generation gap” in there, but that’s not exactly true. Lots of people who have been in my programming courses so far have been barely 10 years younger than my grandparents (mostly men, too, but that’s another post). From there, the whole spectrum of ages is involved, from 50-60somethings to people, like me, in our early-mid 20’s. The difference I’m talking about isn’t really between me and the 65-year-old guy who helped make computer programs work before C++ had even been developed. The difference is between me and my mother, over a decade younger, who can’t really check her email without being walked through the steps of logging on and typing out–letter by painstaking letter–the URL for Gmail.com.

We think about knowledge in different ways. When you rely on books and magazines, and even newscasts and radio interviews, to help you understand a subject, you’ll usually get a fair amount of informational breadth, whether you want it or not. On the internet, for the most part, that call is up to you. You can spend months looking through every available resource, every hobbyist’s webpage and academic’s dissertation, wikipedia and university department sites. Or you can plug a few carefully thought-out terms into your search engine of choice to find the first three sentences relevant to your immediate interest, and stop there. Does the price we pay for so much expanded opportunity and information come out of our attention span and ability to sift through and synthesize it all?As the first to be raised with the internet always on hand, my generation and the one right after us will probably have to answer that question. It’ll be interesting to see how many truly learned scholars of any subject we produce, or whether we’ll have a whole chaotic mess of surface-Renaissance men and women, who can shoot off factoids and statistics on an amazing range of subjects but haven’t had any time to go in and figure out what those facts and numbers mean.In any case, enough of that. My other memorable Google quote this morning was:

“The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.”
- Joseph Heller

That, I think, is one to keep in the front of the brain.

In real life news, several people I know are supposed to be flying today. I suspect that they aren’t. However, I also suspect that they have the common sense to sort it out themselves. It’s a crazy storm, sure, but at the end of the day it’s just the weather.

As far as things I am worried about, I woke up this morning with the same headache that followed me to sleep last night. It wasn’t a migraine then, but it seems to be thinking about turning into one now. I’ve got lots and lots of reasons to be suspicious of this. But the thing about headaches is that they make it very hard to focus on anything. So I’ll just be grumpy and groggy for a while longer and hope it goes away.

After a week or so of research, making phone calls and pestering help lines, I’m down to two options for my new bank. I’m hoping to use today to do a little more in-depth research and sort them out, so I can go ahead and change over on Monday or Tuesday this week. Wish me luck.