***Update: the man I referred to in the third paragraph is actually playing a piccolo and is commonly known as Piccolo Pete.***
Madison's most notorious holiday came and went, and the city is still standing. No mace, no broken windows. Just a whole lot of titties.
State Street was not quite the freakfest I was hoping for. It was more like a freak petting zoo. We walked down and back up--about 45 minutes--which is more or less what everybody does. You get drunk and go for a walk. Some 20,000 people do this. Walking the gauntlet of State Street, with all of its stadium lighting and drunk high-fiving, allows you to simulaneously do all the ogling you want and also be admired for your own costume creativity. It's really all about swapping props. For many a Madison man, however, the emphasis is on the viewing. There were plenty of guys in what could only loosely be described as costumes, who were clearly particiapting more in the voyeuristic side of the holiday.
But most people chose to embrace possibility. There was something for every fetish: the ghouls, the walking puns, the puking partyers, nurses, bo peeps, sluts of every variety, and of course, lots and lots of bouncing flesh. The closest I came to seeing actual knockers was a guy wearing fake plastic boobs and a plastic Twister sheet around his neck (get it... a titty twister?). But I did see a fleet of girls dressed as "slutty referees," a take on the "slutty noun" costume I hadn't seen before. And boy did they run with the genre. To say they were wearing skirts would be a generous way of describing red belts that happened to have some swish, hovering above entirely exposed ass cheeks. There were also four guys dressed as the Jamaican bobsled team. Respect.
And my personal favorite... the guy dressed as UW's best local street personality. I don't want to call him a homeless guy, because I don't know that he is. Nor do I feel comfortable calling him a crazy. But he's not in the same category as the street musicians on State, who look like they have well-appointed living rooms they sit in when they're not busking. He's entirely distinct. He has a big fluffy white beard and sits in front of the university bookstore, dressed in hazard orange from head to toe, playing the recorder. This wouldn't be so great, but what makes Mr. Orange a full-blown personality is that he's always accompanied by a little kokopelli, also dressed in orange, also playing the recorder. He sits with his little buddy and plays and seems mostly oblivious to the comings and goings of students. And I just like the guy, because, well... he has his own doppelganger. And that's badass. I don't know whether the guy on State Street this weekend was dressed as Mr. Orange as a joke, but I like to think it was a token of respect.
At any rate, it was my favorite sighting.
And I just like a city that goes apeshit for Halloween--and does it at the feet of the state capitol. You've gotta get behind a sanctioned festival of hedonism. Even if it's not really what the holiday is about.
~~~~~~~
In other news, I've decided to come to terms with the things I will never be good at. This week: titling emails. It's my worst social inadequacy. I am spectacularly bad at it. I can't leave them blank. No one likes an email without a subject. It's suspect. So I consistently send off inquiries to very professional people, whom I admire and who might someday prove pivotal in my career with subjects like, "A Question," or "Hello," or "I'm a Giant Douchebag." It's hopeless. No matter what I try, the conveyed message is always, "you have new mail....... from a huge tool."
~~~~~~~
My final thought on the weekend: I just learned that medium vs. dark roast has nothing to do with caffeine content in coffee. Huh. I guess that makes sense. I've been proceeding on unexamined assumptions, which would explain some of my recent unfortunate buzzes. Those of you who go to In the Company of Thieves on E. Johnson, the house blend is the most-caffeinated. Just so you know. I didn't.
Happy actual Halloween. Don't turn your lights out and hide. It's not nice, and you will have to scrape egg off your door.
Boo.
30 October 2006
25 October 2006
And the end is increasingly nigh.
***Weather update: It flurried again this week. And we're already averaging 46/32 for the high/low, which is too much like a mid-atlantic December for my tastes.***
In a matter of five minutes this afternoon, I came to the conclusion that Rachael Ray is the devil.
Let me stress the context here. I had just awoken from the most incredible coma on my couch, the kind where it actually feels like you sink into the cushions and a heavy dark blanket of near-death envelops you. I woke up and made a sandwich and needed five minutes of television to facilitate my reentry into the world. Since it was 2:15 in the afternoon, I knew nothing would be on, but I put on NBC, thinking I might get Dr. Phil, the least evil of all daytime programming. (He's still pretty evil.)
But no, Rachael Ray came on. Rachael Ray, who I didn't even know had a daytime network show. In fact, I knew very little about her. I thought she was a cook...? On the food network...? I've heard good things about her cooking, her recipe books, and her personality, so, though I had never really seen her, I had a generally positive sense of her, collectively-constructed via my most savvy friends.
I only watched five minutes, but I am pretty sure she's the devil.
She IS a cook, right? All I saw was an officious interrrupter asking inane questions to reified teen poster David Boreanaz. "Okay. It's 3am and you're walking your dog. Do you scoop the poop or not??" She showed a clip of his show without introducing it and then CLEARLY lacked the vocabulary to talk about things like characterization in the hour-long drama, which he was painfully attempting to discuss in that, "okay, I'm just the talent, but I can at least spit back the director's pre-crafted sound bite about the sublime uniqueness of his particular crime drama" kind of way. And her response was--yet again interrupting the man--to turn to the audience and say, "Pretty watchable, eh? Eh??" thus underbidding Boreanaz's already very low cultural offer.
Who gave this woman a talk show? She's a cook, no? Shouldn't she cook? Shouldn't we all be doing our dao, as it were, and not stinking up the cultural channels with more steaming piles of meaningless words?
I mean ........what?
In a matter of five minutes this afternoon, I came to the conclusion that Rachael Ray is the devil.
Let me stress the context here. I had just awoken from the most incredible coma on my couch, the kind where it actually feels like you sink into the cushions and a heavy dark blanket of near-death envelops you. I woke up and made a sandwich and needed five minutes of television to facilitate my reentry into the world. Since it was 2:15 in the afternoon, I knew nothing would be on, but I put on NBC, thinking I might get Dr. Phil, the least evil of all daytime programming. (He's still pretty evil.)
But no, Rachael Ray came on. Rachael Ray, who I didn't even know had a daytime network show. In fact, I knew very little about her. I thought she was a cook...? On the food network...? I've heard good things about her cooking, her recipe books, and her personality, so, though I had never really seen her, I had a generally positive sense of her, collectively-constructed via my most savvy friends.
I only watched five minutes, but I am pretty sure she's the devil.
She IS a cook, right? All I saw was an officious interrrupter asking inane questions to reified teen poster David Boreanaz. "Okay. It's 3am and you're walking your dog. Do you scoop the poop or not??" She showed a clip of his show without introducing it and then CLEARLY lacked the vocabulary to talk about things like characterization in the hour-long drama, which he was painfully attempting to discuss in that, "okay, I'm just the talent, but I can at least spit back the director's pre-crafted sound bite about the sublime uniqueness of his particular crime drama" kind of way. And her response was--yet again interrupting the man--to turn to the audience and say, "Pretty watchable, eh? Eh??" thus underbidding Boreanaz's already very low cultural offer.
Who gave this woman a talk show? She's a cook, no? Shouldn't she cook? Shouldn't we all be doing our dao, as it were, and not stinking up the cultural channels with more steaming piles of meaningless words?
I mean ........what?
24 October 2006
Some Lake Mendota photos
Pictures I took a few weeks ago ...free from the usual rambling monologue. Click the thumbnails for a blowup.
23 October 2006
The Once and Future English Major
Perhaps that will be the title of my personal statement for my inevitable application for reentry into the coterie of the literarily-inclined. Ahhhhh, J-School. How insistently you remind me that I don't want to be a journalist. I'm not sure that's what you're going for.
The coffee from the shop on my block is intense. I'm now a cup-a-day drinker, to the extent that I get headaches if I do not have my daily cup. So I would think, considering that I'm starting from a defecit each morning, that I could handle fairly intense intake of caffeine. But I consistently order a small cup, spend an hour drinking it, and spend the next eight hours opening and shutting everything in my apartment and discerning the shape of my heart by the impressions it's beating into my chest. It's unnerving. I've also discovered that there's a strong correlation between my being jazzed the eff up on caffeine and my stress level. When I'm in a normal state, my brain is also fairly chill. "Hey, everything's gonna be cool," it says. When my little blood cells get the souped-up drag racing upgrade from the coffeeshop, my brain follows suit. It gets all high-pitched and squeaky and tries to convince me that my workload is impossible and that I should just quit school. So, why do I drink the coffee? Because I neeeeeeeeed it.
I got my always-delayed buzz this evening listening to a panel called the "New Wave Fabulists," which consisted of Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman, and Gary Wolfe. Sitting in the Orpheum theatre, I suddenly felt as if I had passed through an electric fence, which made me very restless and for some reason translated into me checking the time every four minutes. Which says nothing about the content of the discussion, because though it was a bit discursive and unorganized--as any unregulated discussion between authors rightly ought to be--they talked about some interesting things in regards to genre. And Neil Gaiman being my husband. Though this last part was not discussed explicitly, it was quite clearly on all their minds.
The room sort of came to the conclusion that "genre" is a nasty little word. I see where they're coming from, since they are extremely successful writers who bend, break, and otherwise defy genre-ization. But we can't really do without the term, can we? How else to describe a Danielle Steel or a Tony Hillerman? Or the works they create? I think more to the point, we should differentiate between genre-workers and writers. After all, a writer ought to defy genre, no? A writer is a creator. It's a shame that someone like Neil Gaiman is discussed as a reaction to uninspired form writing. "He's a genre-bender." No, he's a writer. Daniele Steel is just a genre whore, and her work does not deserve to be the springboard off of which we discuss the Neil Gaimans of the world.
Just you all wait until I'm in charge of the Language Department in Erinn's New World Domination.
I had to yell at my students this week for doing a shoddy job on their weekly turn-in-something-ANYTHING-related-to-our-discussion-and-earn-credit assignment. I really enjoyed it.
I have a tendency to get really into things for a short period of time until my interest burns out, and then I drop them like they're hot. And simultaneously around the world, a thousand chairs fall over from shock. Okay, no big revelation here. I know an awful little about an awful lot. My deep, deep hope, however, has always been that grad school would be my shot at becoming an expert in something. And now that I despise J-School, I'm worried that I'm just doing that grass-is-greener thing I've always done and that I'm going to turn into Lynn from Girlfriends, a show I am in no way embarrassed to love. Point being, she has like 8 master's degrees in just about all the major social sciences and humanities and lives off of her friends because, well, they're all pretty much worthless. The degrees, not her friends.
I think all I really want is to be in school forever. Oh my god, I am so dysfunctional.
Brian and I have been sporadically working on learning-up my web-building skills, so I'm hoping to have some idea of what I'm doing by the end of the semester and a website up and running by the start of the spring. Details TBA.
And now for one last non-sequitur. Some of my friends and I have noticed a trend in the Wisconsin service industry to answer requests with a tongue-in-cheek, "No, you can't have that, sorry." No, no, I'm sorry. It's obviously my fault for both failing to frame my request as a command and for presuming that you are in fact being paid to fulfill that request. It happened again the other night at Qdoba.
Scene: Qdoba.
Players: Me, hungry. Employee, un-funny.
"May I please have a queso burrito?"
"No."
"What can I have?"
"Nothing."
(tornado of teeth, hair, and tortilla shells)
Okay, so it was more like:
"May I please have a queso burrito?"
"No."
"What can I have?"
"Nothing."
".........."
"Of course you can! Hahahaha."
".........................."
During which silence I wondered what about Wisconsin--the cold, the snow, the cheese-heavy diet--destroys the sense of humor. I'm a nice person. I chat up the help. I spent the last ten years of my life being the help. But it's not a very good joke to begin with, and after hearing it six or eight times, my somewhat convincing titter of amusement has turned into a painfully forced "Ha. ....Ha. Give me the emeffing burrito." The same joke in every local establishment has really lost some luster for me, and besides... you do not get between a girl and her burrito. End of story.
For real.
The coffee from the shop on my block is intense. I'm now a cup-a-day drinker, to the extent that I get headaches if I do not have my daily cup. So I would think, considering that I'm starting from a defecit each morning, that I could handle fairly intense intake of caffeine. But I consistently order a small cup, spend an hour drinking it, and spend the next eight hours opening and shutting everything in my apartment and discerning the shape of my heart by the impressions it's beating into my chest. It's unnerving. I've also discovered that there's a strong correlation between my being jazzed the eff up on caffeine and my stress level. When I'm in a normal state, my brain is also fairly chill. "Hey, everything's gonna be cool," it says. When my little blood cells get the souped-up drag racing upgrade from the coffeeshop, my brain follows suit. It gets all high-pitched and squeaky and tries to convince me that my workload is impossible and that I should just quit school. So, why do I drink the coffee? Because I neeeeeeeeed it.
I got my always-delayed buzz this evening listening to a panel called the "New Wave Fabulists," which consisted of Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman, and Gary Wolfe. Sitting in the Orpheum theatre, I suddenly felt as if I had passed through an electric fence, which made me very restless and for some reason translated into me checking the time every four minutes. Which says nothing about the content of the discussion, because though it was a bit discursive and unorganized--as any unregulated discussion between authors rightly ought to be--they talked about some interesting things in regards to genre. And Neil Gaiman being my husband. Though this last part was not discussed explicitly, it was quite clearly on all their minds.
The room sort of came to the conclusion that "genre" is a nasty little word. I see where they're coming from, since they are extremely successful writers who bend, break, and otherwise defy genre-ization. But we can't really do without the term, can we? How else to describe a Danielle Steel or a Tony Hillerman? Or the works they create? I think more to the point, we should differentiate between genre-workers and writers. After all, a writer ought to defy genre, no? A writer is a creator. It's a shame that someone like Neil Gaiman is discussed as a reaction to uninspired form writing. "He's a genre-bender." No, he's a writer. Daniele Steel is just a genre whore, and her work does not deserve to be the springboard off of which we discuss the Neil Gaimans of the world.
Just you all wait until I'm in charge of the Language Department in Erinn's New World Domination.
I had to yell at my students this week for doing a shoddy job on their weekly turn-in-something-ANYTHING-related-to-our-discussion-and-earn-credit assignment. I really enjoyed it.
I have a tendency to get really into things for a short period of time until my interest burns out, and then I drop them like they're hot. And simultaneously around the world, a thousand chairs fall over from shock. Okay, no big revelation here. I know an awful little about an awful lot. My deep, deep hope, however, has always been that grad school would be my shot at becoming an expert in something. And now that I despise J-School, I'm worried that I'm just doing that grass-is-greener thing I've always done and that I'm going to turn into Lynn from Girlfriends, a show I am in no way embarrassed to love. Point being, she has like 8 master's degrees in just about all the major social sciences and humanities and lives off of her friends because, well, they're all pretty much worthless. The degrees, not her friends.
I think all I really want is to be in school forever. Oh my god, I am so dysfunctional.
Brian and I have been sporadically working on learning-up my web-building skills, so I'm hoping to have some idea of what I'm doing by the end of the semester and a website up and running by the start of the spring. Details TBA.
And now for one last non-sequitur. Some of my friends and I have noticed a trend in the Wisconsin service industry to answer requests with a tongue-in-cheek, "No, you can't have that, sorry." No, no, I'm sorry. It's obviously my fault for both failing to frame my request as a command and for presuming that you are in fact being paid to fulfill that request. It happened again the other night at Qdoba.
Scene: Qdoba.
Players: Me, hungry. Employee, un-funny.
"May I please have a queso burrito?"
"No."
"What can I have?"
"Nothing."
(tornado of teeth, hair, and tortilla shells)
Okay, so it was more like:
"May I please have a queso burrito?"
"No."
"What can I have?"
"Nothing."
".........."
"Of course you can! Hahahaha."
".........................."
During which silence I wondered what about Wisconsin--the cold, the snow, the cheese-heavy diet--destroys the sense of humor. I'm a nice person. I chat up the help. I spent the last ten years of my life being the help. But it's not a very good joke to begin with, and after hearing it six or eight times, my somewhat convincing titter of amusement has turned into a painfully forced "Ha. ....Ha. Give me the emeffing burrito." The same joke in every local establishment has really lost some luster for me, and besides... you do not get between a girl and her burrito. End of story.
For real.
17 October 2006
Coming to terms with snowflakes.
Lately I've been burping excessively. Couldn't tell you why. I rather enjoy burpring, though, so it's kind of okay.
I've been including photos in my posts, and I should give them some context. I went around Madison two afternoons at the end of September and took a bunch of pictures. Like... a bunch. So far I've included some that show the neighborhood around my apartment and some that show scenes from the campus periphery. Included below are some from campus itself. The leaves remain yellow in the photos because they are still the ones from three weeks ago. The reality here is different. Most of the leaves are down... already.
So far I'm actually adjusting to Madison weather pretty well. But then I did spend two months in South America and had three hours of rain the entire time; I was prepared to be disappointed by everything when I came back. So Madison hasn't been too bad. Plus, I've been too busy to much care about the weather. Tuesdays I don't even look out of a window between 9am and 6pm. And when it's shitty outside, I only concentrate better on my work. So I feel an emotional disconnection with the weather. But I can acknowledge that it has been disappointing. As soon as the semester started, it turned cold and rainy. And apart from exceptions I can count on my fingers, it never looked back. I hear tell this isn't typical for Madison autumns. Neither are the leaves changing color in September. Everyone reassures me that Madison is usually temperate through most of October and the leaves change sometime around then and it never rains this much. I can only assume they are lying, as these are all people with a stake in my not fleeing the state.
...Which I swore I would do if it snowed before my birthday. So I've got about half of my stuff packed, and I just need to figure out how to get out of my lease. I never thought to look for an out clause based on premature snow. One of my students says it doesn't count, because it didn't stick, but I say semantics. Air temperature, the movement of fronts, weather goblins with tiny snow machines... whatever. White stuff fell from the sky. I know what that is. It's snow. Peace out, Midwest.
Really, I love it here. I love that I live one block from the lake. I love the public transportation. I love the hippies with strollers and the farmers market and the negligible population of Republicans. I love that there's too much going on for me to do even half of the things I'd like to. I love the draw of a liberal Midwest capital city that brings Andrew Bird, Mark Danielewski, and Neil Gaiman in the same month. I love Erinn, and I love Kevin, and I love my apartment.
Just don't talk to me in mid-January. I'll be sitting in front of my fireplace with a two month supply of food and a bad attitude.
This is Bascom Hill, which is UW's version of a central campus mall. It goes steeply uphill and its buildings contain nothing I will ever use. I never walk up Bascom Hill. But it's pretty.
This is the Union. A couple of posts ago I uploaded a picture of the lake terrace. That's what's on the other side of this building. Inside there's coffee, food, beer, and some other random stuff. I spend most of my time on the terrace outside.
This is the Red Gym, probably the strangest and most-photographed building on campus. It houses the visitor's center and probably a whole bunch of other stuff, considering its size. But I couldn't tell you what those things are.
This is yet another building I like but never set foot in. Pretty picture.
As you might guess, most of the buildings I actually use are very, very, very ugly.
I've been including photos in my posts, and I should give them some context. I went around Madison two afternoons at the end of September and took a bunch of pictures. Like... a bunch. So far I've included some that show the neighborhood around my apartment and some that show scenes from the campus periphery. Included below are some from campus itself. The leaves remain yellow in the photos because they are still the ones from three weeks ago. The reality here is different. Most of the leaves are down... already.
So far I'm actually adjusting to Madison weather pretty well. But then I did spend two months in South America and had three hours of rain the entire time; I was prepared to be disappointed by everything when I came back. So Madison hasn't been too bad. Plus, I've been too busy to much care about the weather. Tuesdays I don't even look out of a window between 9am and 6pm. And when it's shitty outside, I only concentrate better on my work. So I feel an emotional disconnection with the weather. But I can acknowledge that it has been disappointing. As soon as the semester started, it turned cold and rainy. And apart from exceptions I can count on my fingers, it never looked back. I hear tell this isn't typical for Madison autumns. Neither are the leaves changing color in September. Everyone reassures me that Madison is usually temperate through most of October and the leaves change sometime around then and it never rains this much. I can only assume they are lying, as these are all people with a stake in my not fleeing the state.
...Which I swore I would do if it snowed before my birthday. So I've got about half of my stuff packed, and I just need to figure out how to get out of my lease. I never thought to look for an out clause based on premature snow. One of my students says it doesn't count, because it didn't stick, but I say semantics. Air temperature, the movement of fronts, weather goblins with tiny snow machines... whatever. White stuff fell from the sky. I know what that is. It's snow. Peace out, Midwest.
Really, I love it here. I love that I live one block from the lake. I love the public transportation. I love the hippies with strollers and the farmers market and the negligible population of Republicans. I love that there's too much going on for me to do even half of the things I'd like to. I love the draw of a liberal Midwest capital city that brings Andrew Bird, Mark Danielewski, and Neil Gaiman in the same month. I love Erinn, and I love Kevin, and I love my apartment.
Just don't talk to me in mid-January. I'll be sitting in front of my fireplace with a two month supply of food and a bad attitude.
This is Bascom Hill, which is UW's version of a central campus mall. It goes steeply uphill and its buildings contain nothing I will ever use. I never walk up Bascom Hill. But it's pretty.
This is the Union. A couple of posts ago I uploaded a picture of the lake terrace. That's what's on the other side of this building. Inside there's coffee, food, beer, and some other random stuff. I spend most of my time on the terrace outside.
This is the Red Gym, probably the strangest and most-photographed building on campus. It houses the visitor's center and probably a whole bunch of other stuff, considering its size. But I couldn't tell you what those things are.
This is yet another building I like but never set foot in. Pretty picture.
As you might guess, most of the buildings I actually use are very, very, very ugly.
15 October 2006
The prospect of a Mets-Tigers world series... well, it actually makes me want to watch.
If I am the Commander-in-Chief of my life, then I guess it would be appropriate to deliver a State-of-the-Jessie every year on my birthday. Well, everyone, the Jessie is stressed out. Goodnight, and thanks for coming. God bless.
I am a year older, a milepost in which I constantly discover new facets of meaninglessness. This year it meant lots of people being unduly sweet to me and an excuse to throw a party. So for those 36 hours my birthday was rich with import, but as for the age thing, well... so what. 24 is a good number, I guess. It adds up to 6, and it's divisible by many things. It's a full 2 years away from the terrifying "late-20s" designation. So, sure. Why not.
Perhaps significantly, I passed my birthday minute (12:59 PT, in case you care) on a fabulously misguided bus tour of Madison. The mischievous Friday the 13th forces at work? Having gone to the pharmacy, I found myself attempting to take a new bus route home to my apartment, and though I won't belabor the details, let me be clear that I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that I spent 90 minutes on a series of buses. For what should have been a 20-minute ride home. Through various false assumptions and generally ill-informed choices on my part, I wound up navigating an entirely useless circle around the city that took me to places I will probably never go again. And since I managed--I think for the first day since I've been here--to be without iPod, book, or cell phone for this voyage of discovery, I had ample time to contemplate the irony of passing my birthday minute driving useless loops around the university.
I use the word irony, because I am currently driving myself crazy over my academic future. Though I am nothing if not an obsessively self-assessing person, I am in a new place, which means new features to my madness. It all more or less boils down to the following series of realizations:
1.) I don't want to be a journalist (brilliant job, Jessie, enrolling in J-School).
2.) I am an academic; there's absolutely no fighting it.
3.) I should get a Ph.D.
4.) The Communications department does some lovely things.
5.) I am interested in none of them.
It's well and good for my friends in Communications to tell me that the department is incredibly flexible (it is) and that I can study almost anything I want under its guise (I can), but two facts remain: The first is that at some point a communications Ph.D. requires quantitative research. The second is that even if I find a way to get around all the crap I don't like in the department, my future career will be in Communications. So, whatever. It doens't matter right now, because I'm getting a free master's degree and tons of great experience (teaching, being a grad student, etc.). But I can't help feeling that while everyone around me is moving toward an end goal, I am moving away from one.
Aside from righteously depressing self-evaluation and mistaken buses, I had a lovely birthday weekend. Kevin and I threw a mostly-successful party with a fire and lots of snacks. And in other related activities, my office-mates up in Vilas provided cake and a giant Orlando Bloom poster, who they managed to make picking his nose (you had to see it). Erinn made me a Boston cream pie (my favorite of all pies), and I got lots of wonderful presents from her, Kevin, and my mom.
Mark Danielewski came to Madison the day before my birthday for a reading/signing. And the day after my birthday, Andrew Bird was in town for a show. Perhaps augmenting my self-reflection was the arrival of these two creative geniuses who are so clearly doing what they are meant to do with their lives. You look at them and you just know it. And I think I envy the certainty I perceive in this, even though it probably doesn't exist for them. Or maybe it does.
Danielewski may be moving into dangerous territory with the experimentality of his books. House of Leaves toed the line to perfection, but I've found myself disinclined to read Only Revolutions. Listening to him read made me think I should get the audio version. It's hard to read a book so dependent on sound. I've skimmed passages and not even been able to get a handle on the umbrella narrative. But his reading made me want to try.
The last time I saw Andrew Bird I thought he was one more highball away from going completely unhinged. But this time he expressed his obvious musical genius in a coherent way, which for him is still pretty fucking nuts. He's a classically-trained violinist who writes delirious apocalyptic songs and whistles like an effing train. His whistle might even be stronger than his singing voice, which is impressive. He plucks, bows, and smacks his violin, plays the guitar, sings, and whistles, creating loops with pedals at his feet. It's incredible to watch one man with virtuostic mastery of multiple instruments actually create full sound on stage in front of you. And from the sound of the new songs he played, his forthcoming album will be a return to the style of Eggs, which makes me happy in the pants.
A nice wrap-up would be great, but I'm fresh out. So to close this birthday ramble, I give you more pictures, this time closer to home.
This is one of the little sidewalks running through our apartment complex. We live on the second floor of that building on the right. The squarish part sticking out is our sunroom; the bay windows are one-half of our living room. If you were to keep walking though this little alley and cross the street on the other side, you'd come very quickly upon Lake Mendota.
This is the coffeeshop just down the block from my apartment (see those brick buildings on the right?) where I spend most of my weekends.
These are the Blues Brothers dancing gaily inside the coffeeshop.
Stay tuned for actual pictures of the inside of my apartment.
I am a year older, a milepost in which I constantly discover new facets of meaninglessness. This year it meant lots of people being unduly sweet to me and an excuse to throw a party. So for those 36 hours my birthday was rich with import, but as for the age thing, well... so what. 24 is a good number, I guess. It adds up to 6, and it's divisible by many things. It's a full 2 years away from the terrifying "late-20s" designation. So, sure. Why not.
Perhaps significantly, I passed my birthday minute (12:59 PT, in case you care) on a fabulously misguided bus tour of Madison. The mischievous Friday the 13th forces at work? Having gone to the pharmacy, I found myself attempting to take a new bus route home to my apartment, and though I won't belabor the details, let me be clear that I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that I spent 90 minutes on a series of buses. For what should have been a 20-minute ride home. Through various false assumptions and generally ill-informed choices on my part, I wound up navigating an entirely useless circle around the city that took me to places I will probably never go again. And since I managed--I think for the first day since I've been here--to be without iPod, book, or cell phone for this voyage of discovery, I had ample time to contemplate the irony of passing my birthday minute driving useless loops around the university.
I use the word irony, because I am currently driving myself crazy over my academic future. Though I am nothing if not an obsessively self-assessing person, I am in a new place, which means new features to my madness. It all more or less boils down to the following series of realizations:
1.) I don't want to be a journalist (brilliant job, Jessie, enrolling in J-School).
2.) I am an academic; there's absolutely no fighting it.
3.) I should get a Ph.D.
4.) The Communications department does some lovely things.
5.) I am interested in none of them.
It's well and good for my friends in Communications to tell me that the department is incredibly flexible (it is) and that I can study almost anything I want under its guise (I can), but two facts remain: The first is that at some point a communications Ph.D. requires quantitative research. The second is that even if I find a way to get around all the crap I don't like in the department, my future career will be in Communications. So, whatever. It doens't matter right now, because I'm getting a free master's degree and tons of great experience (teaching, being a grad student, etc.). But I can't help feeling that while everyone around me is moving toward an end goal, I am moving away from one.
Aside from righteously depressing self-evaluation and mistaken buses, I had a lovely birthday weekend. Kevin and I threw a mostly-successful party with a fire and lots of snacks. And in other related activities, my office-mates up in Vilas provided cake and a giant Orlando Bloom poster, who they managed to make picking his nose (you had to see it). Erinn made me a Boston cream pie (my favorite of all pies), and I got lots of wonderful presents from her, Kevin, and my mom.
Mark Danielewski came to Madison the day before my birthday for a reading/signing. And the day after my birthday, Andrew Bird was in town for a show. Perhaps augmenting my self-reflection was the arrival of these two creative geniuses who are so clearly doing what they are meant to do with their lives. You look at them and you just know it. And I think I envy the certainty I perceive in this, even though it probably doesn't exist for them. Or maybe it does.
Danielewski may be moving into dangerous territory with the experimentality of his books. House of Leaves toed the line to perfection, but I've found myself disinclined to read Only Revolutions. Listening to him read made me think I should get the audio version. It's hard to read a book so dependent on sound. I've skimmed passages and not even been able to get a handle on the umbrella narrative. But his reading made me want to try.
The last time I saw Andrew Bird I thought he was one more highball away from going completely unhinged. But this time he expressed his obvious musical genius in a coherent way, which for him is still pretty fucking nuts. He's a classically-trained violinist who writes delirious apocalyptic songs and whistles like an effing train. His whistle might even be stronger than his singing voice, which is impressive. He plucks, bows, and smacks his violin, plays the guitar, sings, and whistles, creating loops with pedals at his feet. It's incredible to watch one man with virtuostic mastery of multiple instruments actually create full sound on stage in front of you. And from the sound of the new songs he played, his forthcoming album will be a return to the style of Eggs, which makes me happy in the pants.
A nice wrap-up would be great, but I'm fresh out. So to close this birthday ramble, I give you more pictures, this time closer to home.
This is one of the little sidewalks running through our apartment complex. We live on the second floor of that building on the right. The squarish part sticking out is our sunroom; the bay windows are one-half of our living room. If you were to keep walking though this little alley and cross the street on the other side, you'd come very quickly upon Lake Mendota.
This is the coffeeshop just down the block from my apartment (see those brick buildings on the right?) where I spend most of my weekends.
These are the Blues Brothers dancing gaily inside the coffeeshop.Stay tuned for actual pictures of the inside of my apartment.
12 October 2006
Well, I've never read it, so it can't be that good.
According to askyahoo.com, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is the best-selling novel of all time. The Bible is the best-selling book of all time. The authorship is lovely here. God (or a group of historians with a motive, depending on how you see it). A hack fiction writer borrowing heavily from other sources (or a historian with a motive, depending on how you see it).
Catholicism and Catholic subversion. Interesting, our mental dichotomies. Or rather, our shifting sensibilities over time, because it is probably worth noting the periods of most intense sales for these books. The Bible has had most of literary history to achieve top-dog status; Brown's novel does not come close to eclipsing the Bible, but it reached the top of its genre in a matter of months. And I wonder what the drop-off in Bible sales looks like over the last 100 years--because I'm sure there's been one.
I'd like to see the stats for the number of households currently in possession of a copy of each of the two books. And then again for the number of each sold copy that has actually been read.
I guess it's no surprise--what with population blooms, mega-mass-production, and globalization ushering in an age of international trends and zero-cost translation--that current pop culture would overtake the sales of even the most widely-read classics. 100 years of teachers assigning Crime and Punishment cannot compete with a global feeding frenzy in 2004. So I would postulate that record-holding power is lessening. Look at other fields. It seems every Olympic year, yet more records are broken. We are a culture obsessed with being the best, and since there are about a billion more of us every decade, there's increasing likelihood that the best will soon be bested. How long it takes someone to swim the 100m freestyle is a fairly objective measure of greatness. The best are getting better, even if only by hundredths of a second. But book sales? Consumption quite obviously does not equal quality. In fact, this may be an unfortunately universal axiom.
If the reign of the best-selling novel or the highest-grossing film shrinks with each incarnation, I have to wonder also about the trend in the quality of the champs.
Is the Bible's record going to fall to a tell-all by Colin Powell?
Catholicism and Catholic subversion. Interesting, our mental dichotomies. Or rather, our shifting sensibilities over time, because it is probably worth noting the periods of most intense sales for these books. The Bible has had most of literary history to achieve top-dog status; Brown's novel does not come close to eclipsing the Bible, but it reached the top of its genre in a matter of months. And I wonder what the drop-off in Bible sales looks like over the last 100 years--because I'm sure there's been one.
I'd like to see the stats for the number of households currently in possession of a copy of each of the two books. And then again for the number of each sold copy that has actually been read.
I guess it's no surprise--what with population blooms, mega-mass-production, and globalization ushering in an age of international trends and zero-cost translation--that current pop culture would overtake the sales of even the most widely-read classics. 100 years of teachers assigning Crime and Punishment cannot compete with a global feeding frenzy in 2004. So I would postulate that record-holding power is lessening. Look at other fields. It seems every Olympic year, yet more records are broken. We are a culture obsessed with being the best, and since there are about a billion more of us every decade, there's increasing likelihood that the best will soon be bested. How long it takes someone to swim the 100m freestyle is a fairly objective measure of greatness. The best are getting better, even if only by hundredths of a second. But book sales? Consumption quite obviously does not equal quality. In fact, this may be an unfortunately universal axiom.
If the reign of the best-selling novel or the highest-grossing film shrinks with each incarnation, I have to wonder also about the trend in the quality of the champs.
Is the Bible's record going to fall to a tell-all by Colin Powell?
10 October 2006
Meaning is impossible without ellipses
So says one of the film studies scholars we've been reading for Globalization of Mass Media. He's referring to the idea that, both in terms of the physical senses and in terms of narrative text, we require the ellision of a vast amount of material. There is simply too much to process, and it is only through the carving away of certain information that the rest reveals itself as meaningul. Interesting, I thought. God really is in the details, in the sense that both are too omnipresent for us to grab hold of. It makes me wonder, too, about people who exert selective hearing in order to construct the meaning they WANT to be there (isn't that all of us, after all?), and how depending on a.) your particular experience and b.) your mental ellisions, you will have your own personal semiotics over the course of your life, different from everyone else's.
As you can see by my ridiculous academic opening to my first blog entry, I am in grad school now. And I thought I'd start a new blog to hold what are sure to be all of my fantastically trenchant displays of intellectual superiority. Because I'm a grad student now, and I don't know if you know, but that means I'm smarter than you.
And the sad thing is that there are grad students who believe this, and they roam free, lurking in bars waiting to pounce on impressionable undergrads with arrogant windbagging about half-understood theoretical texts, giving all the rest of us who need the moral support of our equally coffee-ridden colleagues just to keep from dropping out every day a bad name. I have class with some of these people. They are predators and should have to sign a registry and announce their presence in neighborhoods.
But aside from the shiny thought-nuggets I'll be mining from my fertile brain, I hope this will be a kind of Jessie-in-Madison blog, for photos, new experiences, etc. I got sick of my old blog in many ways and wanted to start fresh. So, how can I properly sum up the last two months, which is how long I've been here. Hmm, well, to quote James: "Two words come to mind. Shit and show."
Stellar apartment, tornado sirens, darts, dinner parties, reading, reading, reading, new friends, mixed feelings, mid-life crisis. There, that about does it. In ever so many ways, I feel like a new person. I'm going to go off on an academic rant again, but it makes me think of the Tibetan idea of the "bardo," or the between-state after life and before death. They saw this nebulous non-state as a place where your actions would have consequences far more magnified than ones you were ever able to effect in waking life. So, when you made bad choices in life, you mildly screwed with your next life's potential, but in the bardo, you could make small corrections and go from reincarnating as a slug to reincarnating as a... well, something better than you were before. I forget all of the levels. The point is that it represents a moment when things move at this hyperspeed and when small alterations in your trajectory wildly affect your ultimate destination. I think the last two months have been a bit like this for me.
I moved to Wisconsin. Big deal. But I think that the differences in who I am now as opposed to two months ago are much greater in scale than those from any recent comparable period of time. I simultaneously reached new levels of: relationship structure, personal freedom, professional maturity, and intellectual process. And it's giving me a mid-life crisis. In a good way.
There will be more on this in future entries, I'm sure. All in good time. For now, I leave you with some photos.
This is the street running from campus (directly behind the photo) to the capitol. It's 10-ish blocks long and filled with delicious things like Urban Outfitters, used bookstores and Chipotle. The carts in the foreground are the various smoothie / ethnic food trucks that park there on Library Mall (so named because one of the libraries is right off to the left there). Note also the yellow leaves, as well as the date of this photo... SEPTEMBER 29.
Here's the lake terrace at the student union. Live music often at the stage, lots of local beer. Good times.
Here's another view of the capitol, as seen from my walk home. The building is more or less a symmetrical X, bounded by a traffic square. All around that square every saturday is a huge state farmer's market. Mmmmmm.
As you can see by my ridiculous academic opening to my first blog entry, I am in grad school now. And I thought I'd start a new blog to hold what are sure to be all of my fantastically trenchant displays of intellectual superiority. Because I'm a grad student now, and I don't know if you know, but that means I'm smarter than you.
And the sad thing is that there are grad students who believe this, and they roam free, lurking in bars waiting to pounce on impressionable undergrads with arrogant windbagging about half-understood theoretical texts, giving all the rest of us who need the moral support of our equally coffee-ridden colleagues just to keep from dropping out every day a bad name. I have class with some of these people. They are predators and should have to sign a registry and announce their presence in neighborhoods.
But aside from the shiny thought-nuggets I'll be mining from my fertile brain, I hope this will be a kind of Jessie-in-Madison blog, for photos, new experiences, etc. I got sick of my old blog in many ways and wanted to start fresh. So, how can I properly sum up the last two months, which is how long I've been here. Hmm, well, to quote James: "Two words come to mind. Shit and show."
Stellar apartment, tornado sirens, darts, dinner parties, reading, reading, reading, new friends, mixed feelings, mid-life crisis. There, that about does it. In ever so many ways, I feel like a new person. I'm going to go off on an academic rant again, but it makes me think of the Tibetan idea of the "bardo," or the between-state after life and before death. They saw this nebulous non-state as a place where your actions would have consequences far more magnified than ones you were ever able to effect in waking life. So, when you made bad choices in life, you mildly screwed with your next life's potential, but in the bardo, you could make small corrections and go from reincarnating as a slug to reincarnating as a... well, something better than you were before. I forget all of the levels. The point is that it represents a moment when things move at this hyperspeed and when small alterations in your trajectory wildly affect your ultimate destination. I think the last two months have been a bit like this for me.
I moved to Wisconsin. Big deal. But I think that the differences in who I am now as opposed to two months ago are much greater in scale than those from any recent comparable period of time. I simultaneously reached new levels of: relationship structure, personal freedom, professional maturity, and intellectual process. And it's giving me a mid-life crisis. In a good way.
There will be more on this in future entries, I'm sure. All in good time. For now, I leave you with some photos.
This is the street running from campus (directly behind the photo) to the capitol. It's 10-ish blocks long and filled with delicious things like Urban Outfitters, used bookstores and Chipotle. The carts in the foreground are the various smoothie / ethnic food trucks that park there on Library Mall (so named because one of the libraries is right off to the left there). Note also the yellow leaves, as well as the date of this photo... SEPTEMBER 29.
Here's the lake terrace at the student union. Live music often at the stage, lots of local beer. Good times.
Here's another view of the capitol, as seen from my walk home. The building is more or less a symmetrical X, bounded by a traffic square. All around that square every saturday is a huge state farmer's market. Mmmmmm.
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