yes,

i can spell specific.

wooster collective

i wandered here and found, among other things,

oh yes, street art, accidental art experiences, site specifc, fleeting, temporary…..all my favorites. (but of course i love a good painting too.) thanks here, for the path.

promoting creative time with pictures

the pedagogy lecture.

looks unassuming…

this small stack of papers have been blanketing all horizontal surfaces in my apartment for, roughly, a year. and has been coating all my thoughts for longer. there is no way that i can, just now, articulate the process of writing my master’s thesis. i had to learn not only the material, but also how to think.

here are a few observations:

1. no one writes academic papers alone. they would be flat. (thanks to my thesis advisor and my second reader and the english department at hunter college.)

2. learning how to construct a complicated, unresolvable and coherent(ish) argument means that you also learn how to think complicatedly, unresolvably and sort of coherently.

3. completing this project leaves you practically no better off than before (still looking for work), but vastly improved in intellectual capability. not that i am claimin to be an intellectual, only that i am claiming that the apartment of my mind is larger.

4. reading is one of the smartest things a person can do with her/his time.

creative time fun

i will be attending the eroticism of pedagogy at judson memorial church on may 4th. it’s a performance with liam gillick and ryan gander, among others, and it’s described as challenging the traditional power relations involved in pedagogy. being an adjunct, i’m absolutely curious. and creative time consistently produces thoughtful projects. fun ones too.

i’d add a picture, but i still can’t load them from home. maybe i’ll take the computer out with me tomorrow.

jane eyre with orson welles

again, feeding my love of orson welles. i watched this version of “jane eyre” last night. today, i thought how different acting for film has become. welles is very theatrical in this performance..effectively harsh, then kind, then flirtatious, then loving and so on, but also constantly mannered. the lighting in this film made me laugh. there is a scene where jane is talking to rochester; he looks off over her head and the light shines like two pinpoints, right in the center of his eyes. it was meant to convey, i think, emotional depth, but it was hilarious. and the make-up. oh, too much.

there is no hint, in this adaptation, that bertha could be a sympathetic character, or that rochester could have pushed her from the burning roof–only that rochester is long-suffering (as is eyre) and rewarded at the end with true love. charlotte bronte actually wrote a more complex novel than this. rochester is more complicated and less sympathetic. eyre is more independent and less self-sacrificing.

i am interested in agnes morehead. she was in kane and the magnificent ambersons–they were her first films, in fact–long before she was endora. what else has she done that’s worth seeing? dramatic roles? as kane’s mother, she was terrifyingly strong.

and i knew it was her, but elizabeth taylor was helen. and the only film stills on imdb were of her. she dies in the beginning of the film.

and i would put in a photo, but i haven’t been able to upload images since the weekend.

teaching merce rodoreda to freshmen

i chose to teach, as an example of the short novel, la placa del diamante, by merce rodoreda. it is a decent length for a survey literature course; it is a fairly stylistically digestible modernist novel by a woman writer (i love virginia woolf; however, i am loathe to spend too little time on to the lighthouse. perhaps my thought that it is too complex to pass over quickly is shaped by  my enormous admiration of woolf’s ability to compress such  complex  associations into smooth prose. rodoreda is fun to teach. i’ll write more on it later; my student’s comments are worth sharing. my secondary reason for teaching this novel is that i discovered rodoreda while i was briefly living in barcelona and was surprised to see so little about her in english language criticism, and to find that few literature professors had heard of her. maybe next time i’ll teach mirall trencat.

nearly finished

my thesis.

so i’ll return to blogging soon; maybe more illustrated this time.

james thierree photo

james thierree in au revoir parapluie.