Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Thanks a lot, Emily


Forget ever hearing the tune without also hearing these lyrics - I may never stop having them stuck racing through my head. (Do I secretly find this fact deliciously geeky? Yes. Am I therefore fully pleased about this? No.)

Monday, June 13, 2011

Some Thoughts from A Really Scattered Weekend

- The girl two machines in front of me at the gym today had a ridiculously nice ass. Like the Platonic ideal of what a white girl's ass should be. To quote Ron Burdgandy, I wasn't even mad, just impressed. I was tempted to tap her on the shoulder and ask what her strength routine is but I decided in time that that was kiiiind of creepy so I abstained.

- Big shout-out to Dmitri for drunkenly hassling me about learning and using the multi-touch shortcuts on my new computer. Because man, they are amazing. It's not quite as "how did I live without this?" as when I first switched to a Mac and learned about keyboard shortcuts, but it's definitely increased the ease with which I navigate documents, especially in terms of web surfing and reading long articles. It's a good reminder to me not to be a secret Luddite who never upgrades her software because learning about all the "improvements" is too much of a pain. Turns out calling them "improvements" is not merely a scam to make you reboot - software upgrades are useful! (See also: my giving numerous students higher grades on presentations because I didn't realize that the reason their powerpoints looked so much better than mine was because they were using a version that didn't predate the Bush administration.)

Also - considering how much money I didn't have I paid for this thing, it only makes sense to get as much out of it as possible.

- Holy crap my back is sore. (Doo-dah, doo-dah...) 

- After a successful (almost too much so) day at the mall with Marshelle and Jessie, I realize the reason I feel like all my clothes are boring and plain is not in fact because it's hard to find any other kind these days, but merely because I almost never go shopping anymore (and when I do, for the past year or so it's pretty much exclusively been at Target).

- I've been starting to think that the question of whether or not a given dude has any potential traction as someone who'd fit well with me (and vice versa, of course) is not in fact as difficult to shed light on as I've been feeling it is for the past year or so - but simply a matter of asking myself if I could imagine him working at a Tarsa family Christmas. Not necessarily instantly fitting in like one born to the role (I'm looking at you, Tom Harper) - just that the idea of them there doesn't make me wince in discomfort. I feel like much wasted time in my romantic history could have been avoided if I had realized this earlier on. But then - such is youth.

- Writing that last point started off being about dudes but definitely ended up being about my family. And has made me realize that I really miss them. I think a lot of my distance from them over the past year or so is more a defense mechanism than anything else. I can't see any of them more than a few times a year at this stage in my life. There's nothing I can do about that. I was brought up to value opportunity over geographical fidelity, and my life to date reflects that. But damn - sometimes I wish that was not among the family values (especially the ones I got an extra-large dose of as the oldest) and we'd all settled down within an easy drive of home. (Which would still be in New Hampshire in this fantasy, btw.)

- This weekend has completely fucked my sleep cycle and is threatening to set off my anxiety issues about falling asleep. Joy. Hopefully I can drag myself out of bed early enough tomorrow to start repairing the damage. 

- Some really great, productive reading and thinking for my prelims question this weekend - somehow, between the not sleeping and the staying out too late and the shopping excursions. Looking at a few theoretical approaches to the word vs image question in regards to meaning-making and then finishing with what amounted to a practical-minded and applied consideration of the same issue by Edward Tufte (whose Beautiful Evidence I am 100% assigning next time I teach 201) was incredibly useful. It highlighted the benefits and shortcomings of both theoretical and practical approaches to the question (and all questions, I guess) - both from a scholarly standpoint and a pedagogical one. 

And less convolutedly - if you're looking for a good starting point for thinking about how to begin bringing multimodal work into your teaching (or your own writing), this is a really great book to check out. It's by no means perfect -  its focus on quantitative content doesn't always result in a clean map onto Humanities writing, and he's kind of a jackass at many points. But by jettisoning all the anxiety about the word-vs-image hierarchy and simply asking "how can we use the visual to present evidence in as effective and beautiful a way as possible?", he's able to come up with some truly incredible ideas and illustrations of them.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Ode to Catherine Deneuve

She's amazing for some many reasons. Her acting is strong, her choice of roles varied without being crazed and directionless, her presence and sense of self constant. But perhaps what I find most notably remarkable about her is the way she's let reality touch her beauty at nearly every stage of her career.

For example, tonight I saw her in Potiche, a cute fairy-tale account of a bourgeouise housewife in her 50s reinventing herself in the light of new-wave feminism. And unlike so many American actresses of her age, she looked her age. And yet still beautiful.

But her beauty-as-reality extends as far back as Belle de Jour, probably the role in which she was most highly sexualized. Take this frame - you'd never see such openly real depiction of a film's sexual heart today:

Her body looks real - something unheard of today (even in European cinema, I would argue - at least among ingenue shots).

...as I'm writing this I realize that much of what I'm arguing is as much or more about the conventions of the times or the region as about Deneuve herself. But because I find her so incredibly beautiful, so talented, so strong an onscreen presence, it heightens the effect for me. She's gorgeous at all ages even when she looks less than contemporary-Hollywood-perfect. And I find that both engaging and oddly empowering - like a look behind the veil.

I got to get myself a copy of Belle de Jour.