September 28, 2022

The last two personal essays I've completed, and the one I'm working on now, have reminded me that one of my greatest challenges as a writer is emotional resistance.  Over the winter and spring, I tackled two pivotal years from college, centering the essay on the creative stuff I wrote during those years.  It wound up being a rewarding journey of self-discovery, since I had repressed a lot from that time, but the pain of those years prompted me to take frequent breaks, up to a few weeks on a couple of occasions, so that the resulting essay took me five months to feel satisfied with (though in fairness to me, it's long: 8,400 words).  I moved from that to a shorter essay about memories from my early childhood.  This was a more straightforward project, and one that enabled me reclaim a richer, more mixed picture of that time in my life than I'd previously had.  As such, it was a joy to write, and took me just a few weeks to complete.  Now I'm tackling my time in, and relationship to academia.  I've articulated some core ideas that I think will make this essay a rewarding piece, but the subject is one that I feel a lot of ambivalence about because it spans three decades of personal struggle -- a great deal to digest and express succinctly -- and features multiple failures (two divorces and an abandoned career).  I'll emerge on the other side having finally embraced who I am, but after so much denial, it's hardly a heroic outcome.  The essay will require more than a little emotional nakedness to come out well, and I find myself resenting that, and myself for my hesitancy and my failures over those decades, necessary though they ultimately were.  Part of me would love to abandon it already, but it's an integral part of a larger project, an essay collection that will be my "memoir in shards."  With my work schedule and other commitments, I'll be really surprised if I finish it before the new year.

September 25, 2022

Fabulous kickoff to the PSO's new season, featuring the gloriously eccentric Symphonie fantastique by Hector Berlioz. Oh yeah, and then I passed that yellow bubble pyramid in an empty lot on my way back to the parking garage (as one does).

September 23, 2022

I was in the mood to do something this afternoon that had nothing to do with my job, my writing, or my to-do list, aka something fun, so I went to see the new documentary on David Bowie, Moonage Daydream.  I've never been a yuge Bowie fan, but I like several of his songs, and I've always liked the Ziggy Stardust album; and since the trailer featured lots of footage from the Ziggy period, and since the movie's title was taken from a song on that LP, I figured it would be a good bet, and so I didn't bother reading any reviews beforehand, which is something I never do.  In a way, I'm glad I didn't, because if I'd come across any that expressed the reservations about the film that I walked away with, I probably wouldn't have gone to see it.  And I'm not sorry that I saw it, as I thought it was an interesting film.  It was certainly more interesting than the biopic of Bowie's younger contemporaries Freddie Mercury and Queen that I saw when it came out a few years back.  But I don't think it was better.  Moonage Daydream is an often phantasmagoric mashup of concert and interview footage, and audio snippets of Bowie talking about art, life, fame, his past, etc., played over music-video style collages of images, home movies of him traveling, etc.  Its structure is loosely chronological, though with lots of jumping ahead and back.  These compositional features nicely complement, and in a sense mirror, the largely improvisational nature of Bowie's various artistic phases that emerges over the course of the film.  At the same time, though, the foregrounding of these features, and their repetitiveness, betray an emptiness at the film's core.  Moonage Daydream does not meaningfully interrogate Bowie's various stances and pronouncements.  There are no independent voices except those of his different interviewers, and these always brief encounters are with few if any exceptions edited so as to give Bowie the last word.  Ultimately, the film feels like a clever but overlong fan tribute.  Bowie himself, at least as presented here, seems to have (mostly) rejected the idea that any of us are knowable in any meaningful way, so I can imagine this being a documentary he would have liked.  However, I'm not sure that it's the documentary he, or any of us who appreciate his music and art, deserve.

 

September 21, 2022

Lots of goings on in Chez Stas's kitchen last night: peach crisp (ur-phase and finished product) and fresh salsa with tomatoes from friends. Not pictured: prosciutto and onion quiche that I tucked in the freezer for later. NB: Spike seemed intermittently curious (mainly once dusk fell and she wasn't busy photosynthesizing). The Aubrey Jr. twins were nice enough not to interfere.

September 20, 2022

Just got my updated COVID booster and flu shot, and am hoping my left arm doesn't fall off in the next 48 hours. 😬

September 18, 2022

First program of the 2022-23 season: the opera Rusalka by Antonin Dvořák, a Czech adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's folk tale, "The Little Mermaid." The plot is simple, but the music is gorgeous -- the ending is exquisite -- and the opera plumbs some interesting psychological depths that the leads did a nice job of teasing out. A very worthwhile experience! (NB: Sporting a new haircut.)

 

 

September 15, 2022

Love this!

 

In case you're unfamiliar with the context, people on the far right (aka racists) are up in arms about Disney's casting of Halle Bailey in their new live-action version of The Little Mermaid, because as everyone knows, mermaids are, um, white, and um, having a mermaid of color is "woke" or some shit.  A brief piece from Rolling Stone summarizes the "controversy."  The writer points out that in the source story, the folk tale recorded by Dane Hans Christian Andersen, the mermaid "has green skin" (whoopsie).

 

NB: Click on the image above to go to the original Twitter thread, which has a couple more images and some amusing comments.

P.S. There's also this:

September 11, 2022

I watched 60 Minutes' story about the FDNY during 9/11, and was transported back to that day and its aftermath. I was teaching at Queens College, CUNY, that morning -- a course on Gothic fiction, of all things -- and during our mid-class break (it met once a week for three hours), one of my students entered the room and said that the towers had been hit. I asked her if she was serious, and when she confirmed that she was, I cancelled the rest of class, answered a few students' questions about assignments and such, and then exited the building and turned west...The news hadn't seemed real until I saw the huge charcoal gray funnel of smoke drifting peacefully above the southern end of Manhattan Island. The rest of that day was numbing. I wasn't able to get home to our apartment in the Bronx because all the bridges were closed, and wound up staying that night with my ex's mother and sister, watching the non-stop news coverage all afternoon and evening. The subsequent weeks were also difficult. I remember being afraid for a couple of weeks when the bus I took to and from the campus crossed the bridge between the Bronx and Queens, thinking that a plane might take it out while we were there -- completely irrational, I know. I remember a favorite student, a young Iranian-American woman, disappeared for a few weeks afterwards, then told me when she returned that things were hard in her neighborhood and she hadn't felt safe. I remember in the classroom in which that course met, a student pointing out a piece of graffiti someone had scrawled above the door: "Kill all sand n*ggas." She asked that it be removed, and I or another of my students did so. I remember visiting the Financial District a few weeks after 9/11, once the area had been reopened to the public, and how ghostly the streets and closed shops looked blanketed in a pale gray powder, and the lingering acrid chemical smell. That day in September, and the rest of that semester, fundamentally altered my approach as a teacher, and changed me as a person; and watching the footage of these public servants putting their lives on the line, and in many cases sacrificing them, and hearing the interviews with the survivors, the pain and resolve in their voices, was really difficult even two-plus decades later.

September 10, 2022

Spike left the petri dish (as the Aubrey Jr. twins were disparagingly calling it) and became a "real plant" (the twins' words) last night. As obnoxious as the twins are, thankfully they're not vegetarians, so I think Spike will survive her time with them until I switch her to a big pot in the living room. (I on the other hand would feel anxious if I had to spend the night in the kitchen with them.

 

September 8, 2022

Since I can't have pets in my apartment, I give my plants names. The contraband night blooming cereus leaf is about ready to be planted, so it's time for her to have her own handle. I thought about names that reflect her shady past, but since she doesn't have a partner, I rejected Bonnie (no Clyde), Ethel (Rosenberg: no Julius), and Thelma or Louise. Since she's a night bloomer, I considered Hecate, but I didn't want to scare the other green guys. Then I looked at her, and the choice became obvious: she's a cactus (if a gangly v. prickly variety), and those adorable roots...So world, meet the new girl: Spike!