Notes from the Blur
Started classes on Tuesday—my last semester as a (wildly non-traditional) undergrad, and though I feel a lot of things about that, for now it's simply go! go! go! It will almost certainly be over before I've had time to reflect. The line-up includes some eleventh-hour requirements, and three truly exciting endeavors...
- Intensive Intermediate French for Oral Proficiency: a six-credit bonanza that will have me speaking French daily. I was completely freaked out about this before I started. I have three semesters under my belt, but the last was in 2000, and this course is taught exclusively in French. Much to my surprise, however, I understand 95% of what's going on in class. Speaking is another story, but with practice I think I'll be okay.
- The Religious Quest (comparative theology): I took the second part of this course out-of-sequence last semester. We begin each class meeting by "arriving in the room," usually through silent meditation followed by a poem. I shit you not, yesterday's poem was by Mary Oliver. Though I'm unequivocally atheist, I enjoy this class. It gives me a warm feeling I can't really explain in a brief note (though I assure you it has nothing whatsoever to do with [gag!] Mary Oliver). It's not at all a religious or even a spiritual feeling. I believe (mind + heart) that the God concept is a human invention, and nothing I hear/read/see in this class makes me feel otherwise. Nonetheless, something approaching the real seems to happen when not-terribly-religious people (i.e. most of my classmates) come together to talk about the spirit. Perhaps it's just "getting personal" with one another, and the contrast with ordinary social interaction. I don't know.
- Beyond Tradition—Experimental Arts/20th Century: Dada Provocations, Surrealist Visions of Desire, The Marcel Duchamp Effect, Postmodern Scandals. A chance to engage historical avant-gardes and contemplate the problems their work creates for contemporary art. I'm sure I'm going to have a great deal more to say about all this throughout the semester. The day before yesterday, for instance, I was reading Tristan Tzara's Seven Dada Manifestos (see below) and re-thinking my perceptions of the Jim Show. Tactics + politics. One of the issues that came up in the first class meeting was the effect of avant-garde tactics in what I'll arbitrarily call the post-Howard Stern Age. Sans the capacity to truly shock (given the context), is what looks like contemporary avant-gardism all surface and no depth? Some critics think so. But look at what Jim's doing. He's not simply shaking his angry, radical fist at some vague establishment that's become devastatingly efficient at tuning him out—i.e. government or conservatives or popular culture. He's hitting where it hurts, and where there's a chance it might matter. He's hitting you and me, and he's doing it with viscousness, toilet humor, and extreme anti-authoritarianism. After all, it would be impossible to become a "follower" of Jim Behrle, even if one agreed with ALL of his critique. He's not articulating any positive program in the first place, and even if he was he'd publicly humiliate the first person who claimed to be on his bandwagon. Doth that mean Jim is DADA and therefore I approve? No. But it's something to think about.
- Queer Literary Traditions: the literary complement to the theory course I took last semester. More than I have time to talk about right now.
- Creative Honors Thesis: poems! poems! poems!
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My daughter brought home some fundraising materials from school yesterday. I hate these fucking things. They tantalize kids with all sorts of nifty "prizes" for selling so much junk, when in fact it's the parents who do the selling. Way to teach the kids that working for a good cause is its own reward.
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The next issue of TNHR is coming together more slowly than usual, but I'm genuinely excited about what we have in store. Richard Siken commented over on Seth's blog recently about his preference for editors who are advocates rather than gatekeepers. That's exactly the role I'm chasing this time around. Stay tuned.
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I have to drive down to New Jersey tonight and back on Sunday. Damn you, Connecticut! Your highways suck. Miles of Boring dotted here and there with Ugly. How I have longed to carve you right out of the map, stitching northern New York to southern Massachusetts! My mother recently relocated herself west, which makes this drive five hours long on a good day. I shudder to think what Friday night will be like, and Sunday afternoon. But the school schedules (mine and Jacinda's) leave me no choice.
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On deck for this weekend: Plato's Symposium and Meno; John Heartfield's photomontages & Hannah Hoch's collages; a shitload of French; two new poems; and a theology reflection paper/group project.
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Better get my nose to the grindstone now, eh? But before I do...
from "Monsiur Antipyrine's Manifesto" by Tristan Tzara: "DADA is our intensity: it erects inconsequential bayonets and the Sumatral head of German babies; Dada is life with neither bedroom slippers nor parallels; it is against and for unity and definitely against the future; we are wise enough to know that our brains are going to become flabby cushions, that our antidogmatism is as exclusive as a civil servant, and that we cry liberty but are not free; a severe necessity with neither discipline nor morals and that we spit on humanity."
