You know what I love?  Designing new classes.  I love sitting at my computer with about ten browser tabs running, each with some bibliographic source or somebody else’s online syllabus, just imagining possibilities:  what if I paired the Bush and Nelson with the Borges?  Should Kittler come before or after McLuhan?  Oh, yes, and then if I teach Landow, I’ve got to teach Aarseth, because oh, the controversy!*

It’s thrilling, imagining new combinations of material and the conversations that might arise from them.  And so I do this nearly every year, and when I’m not designing new classes, I’m redesigning old ones.  It keeps things fresh, new, alive.

But here are the problems with this relentless need to innovate:  first off, I inevitably get so amazed by the possibilities presented by any given class that I totally overload it with material.  A reasonable syllabus, with a reasonable quantity of reading, always strikes me as inadequate, missing several key texts that absolutely must be included.

Second, I never fail to include a few things that I ought to have read by now but haven’t.  The up side of this is that teaching new texts is one of the few ways that I actually get to read them, but the down sides are plentiful:  sometimes it turns out that the new texts don’t work as well in the course as I’d hoped; often it turns out that I’ve got less time to do a really attentive reading and preparation of the text than I really need.

Teaching new classes, semester in and semester out, is exhausting, and yet I can’t quite stop myself.  Every year I say, no more new classes.  I’ve got tenure now; next year I recycle old material, and innovation be damned!  But every year I wind up tinkering, or building all new syllabi.  It’s a compulsion.  And I know I’m going to kick myself in the fall for what I’m doing this week, but this week I’m having enormous amounts of fun, just imagining the possibilities.

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*Quite obviously, one of the new classes I’m designing for the fall is on new media theory, and I’m completely fired up about it.  I’m adapting some portions of this course from the Literary Machine class of a couple of years ago, but a little over half of the class is new.  I’m also teaching—for the first time, believe it or not—our intro to the English major course, and as an overload (yeah, yeah, yeah), I’m teaching the first half of the Intro to Cultural Studies course up at the graduate school.  This last is heavily adapted from my undergrad Marxism and Cultural Studies course, though, so I’m really hoping that prep can be minimal, and that such minimal prep won’t be a liability.

deconstruction 1

Originally uploaded by KF.

So I’ve finally given in and drunk the kool-aid, and have uploaded my first photoset to flickr.  I’m not entirely sure why it took me this long, though it has something to do with the gallery feature of ExpressionEngine, which I was pretty committed to making work.  And it’s a great feature, but flickr’s mighty compelling, so this is kind of an experiment to see which I like better.

This post is largely a test, to make sure that the API I’m using is working properly.  In part, though, I’m also showing off a set of condo-related photos, documenting the demolition of the old city yard directly across the street from me, over the course of the spring semester.  Construction is on the verge of beginning on phase 2 of my neighborhood, and the new village expansion is similarly beginning just down the street from me.  The good news about this is that my pseudo-urban life is about to become a bit more convincing; the bad news is that the inconveniences of construction will be everywhere in evidence for the next year-plus.

So the storied twenty-one year high school reunion has come and gone.  And I have to say, I had way more fun than I imagined I would.  It was a bit of a blur—there are dozens of people I’d have liked to spend more time talking to, but barely got past “omigod! hi!” with.  But a few highlights:

– On a rough estimate, I’d say that 50% of my class looks really extremely good for our collective advancement in age.  Perhaps 20% looked way older than we actually are.  I’m not sure if those numbers are representative or not.

– Another rough estimate:  I think about 80% of my class has kids.  Maybe more.  I’m just now at the point in my life where I don’t find the fact of my friends getting pregnant somewhat scandalous, so I’m a bit surprised by the number of them who have apparently done so.  In the end, I think this reveals much more about me than about anyone else.

– My class produced what seems to me an inordinate number of lawyers.  I have no idea what that’s all about.  To my knowledge, there are only four academics, of whom three showed up.

– My boyfriend from my senior year in high school is now a plastic surgeon.  And the class heartthrob—blond, blue-eyed, athletic, perfect teeth, just generally drop-dead gorgeous—is an OB-GYN.  I don’t know what to make of that at all.

– My brain is apparently only capable of holding so much information.  And I’m curious how it selects what it’s going to hold onto.  For instance, I spot a woman across a crowded hallway, a woman who wasn’t in my high-school circle of friends, at all, and my brain immediately kicks up her first and last name.  But another woman, whom I’d had several classes with, and who I think may well have lived on my hall during my first year of college, has to introduce herself to me.  (And my ever-so-slick response is an exclaimed “I remember you!” To which she says, “gee, thanks.” Yeesh.)

– Maybe it’s just me.  But on the off chance it’s not:  you know that person to whom you’ve owed an apology for 21 years?  I got a chance to make that apology.  I may or may not tell the story another time.

I’m not usually one for remembering anniversaries, my own or other people’s.  I’m not sure why.  It’s not that milestones don’t register with me; call it a problem of data storage and retrieval.

The reason I mention this now is that yesterday, the day of my twenty-one year high school reunion, was the three year anniversary of the founding of this here blog.  I’d have completely missed it (as I missed anniversaries one and two), but for the nostalgia produced by yesterday’s events, which made me think about the passage of time, which made me reflect that… it was mid-June, wasn’t it?  And a little ExpressionEngining later, the discovery that yes, in fact, it was yesterday.

So happy anniversary to me.  An overflow of obsolescence here, and more in production, always.

More about the reunion when I can think clearly again.

The travel day yesterday went completely smoothly, utterly without any of the usual delays and aggravations.  But there’s a moment I need to share, about a homecoming of a very different order.

There was an Army sergeant on the IAH-BTR leg of my flight, sitting in the aisle seat of row 1.  I was on the other side of the plane, in row 2, and I was happy to see him there, assuming at first that he, in full dress uniform, was making his way home from Iraq, and that the airline had upgraded him as a gesture of thanks.  The guy sitting next to him assumed so as well, and asked him about it, and the sergeant responded, quietly, that no, he was transporting a casualty home.

Last night, Louisiana National Guardsman David Joseph Murray was met at the airport by his family, and a color guard.  As we began our initial approach into Baton Rouge, the pilot told us of the sad cargo our flight was carrying, and of the sad duty of the sergeant in row 1, and asked that we all remain seated after arrival until the sergeant debarked the plane.

And we did.  After the plane pulled up to the gate, the sergeant rose, and the rest of us sat very still, thinking of our own homecomings, or of our loved ones who are far away, or of—regardless of what one may think of this war—the sacrifices made by too, too many young people.  And no one moved a muscle, until the flight attendant thanked us for our patience.

For our patience.  As if that were any struggle, at such a moment.

Yesterday was a fabulous day at documentary boot camp, and a very good note for me to go out on.  There are, in fact, two more days to go in the Flaherty, but I’m off to Louisiana this morning.  And though I’m a little burned out, I’m still regretting missing the last two days of films.

Yesterday’s lineup (during which the morning session was cancelled):

Wednesday, July 15, 1.00 pm

– El perro negro (The Black Dog:  Stories from the Spanish Civil War, dir. Peter Forgács, 2005, 84 min)

Wednesday, July 15, 3.15 pm

Presentation by The Labyrinth Project:

– Tracing the Decay of Fiction:  Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill

– Three Winters in the Sun:  Einstein in California

– Bleeding Through:  Layers of Los Angeles

Wednesday, July 15, 8.00 pm

– La Television y Yo (Television and Me, dir. Andres Di Tella, 2003, 75 min)

– Del Olvido al no me Acuerdo (I Forgot, I Don’t Remember, dir. Juan Carlos Rulfo, 1999, 70 min)

All of these films and interactive projects were wonderful, but La Television y Yo demands special mention; this film begins from its director’s sense that, due to the seven years of his childhood his family spent abroad, he missed some key to Argentine life that could have been found on television.  Di Tella begins an exploration of early Argentine television but finds all possible avenues for investigation to be blocked, and instead gradually comes to recognize that his interests demand in part an exploration of his own family history.  The film becomes part autobiography and part public history, and in no small part a meditation on its own failures to fully comprehend either.

I’m headed to my reunion shortly—how appropriate to be revisiting my own past on the heels of these documentary explorations of memory and history…

Another foreshortened day at the Flaherty; in the middle of the afternoon screening, I began developing a massive headache, so when it was over, I headed home, took a nap, had a quiet dinner, and did some reading.  Print is so soothing after such intensive experience with images—which only surprises me because my usual experience over the last twelve years has been soothing myself with images after ingesting too much text.

Anyhow, yesterday’s bill, as far as I made it:

Tuesday, June 14, 9.00 am

– Paradox (dir. Leandro Katz, 2001, 30 min)

– Afrique, je te plumerai (Africa, I will fleece you, dir. Jean-Marie Temo, 1992, 88 min)

Tuesday, June 14, 2.00 pm

– clip from Time in the Sun (dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1940, 55 min)

– Un Banquete en Tetlapayac (dir. Olivier Debroise, 2000, 100 min)

Yesterday’s films were fascinating, but it’s easy for me to understand why my brain short-circuited in their midst.  Paradox is a meditative exploration of the disjunctions of contemporary existence in the so-called “banana republics”; Katz alternates between silent, eerily still images of an ancient idol (the Dragon of Quiriguá) and the frenetic activity of the banana plantation and industry that surrounds it.  The paradox manifests both in these contradictions between past and present, stillness and activity, freedom and labor, as well as in the mysterious absence of their mediating, causal term: the colonialism that destroyed one and installed the other.

Afrique, je te plumerai likewise explores the damage done by successive forms of colonialist rule in Cameroon, but does so with an emphasis on communication, on the role of language, print, and visual media forms in continuing a post-colonial oppression.

The afternoon’s films were of a quite different order, and I wish I could have fully concentrated on them, as I’m pretty sure that what I’ve comprehended is a mere skimming of the surface.  The basic backdrop is this:  in 1930, Sergei Eisenstein traveled to Mexico to begin filming what was intended to be his epic study, Que Viva Mexico!, funded in large part by Upton Sinclair.  Two years later, however, Eisenstein was forced to leave Mexico, both by the deepening economic crisis of the Depression and by Josef Stalin’s demand that the filmmaker return to the Soviet Union.  Eisenstein lost control of the footage he’d shot; Sinclair tried several times to send the footage to Eisenstein in Russia, but as the filmmaker had by this point been denounced as a Trotskyite, the Soviet film industry blocked the importation of the film.  As a result, only pieces of Eisenstein’s film have been released, and only as edited together by others, including Thunder over Mexico (1933), by Sol Lesser, and Time in the Sun (1940), by Mary Seton.  (A project aimed at the restoration of Eisenstein’s original plan now exists, though it’s a bit of a stretch to understand how such a project could ever be “definitive.”)

In any event:  in 1998, Olivier Debroise returned to Tetlapayac, the hacienda where Eisenstein spent much of 1931, in an effort to explore the mysteries surrounding this unfinished film.  Un Banquete en Tetlapayac begins with the shooting death of Rosalita, the sister of one of Eisenstein’s actors, and then proceeds through a kind of imaginative reenactment of the events of that period.  Debroise brings together a collection of contemporary writers and artists, each of whom inhabits the role of one of the figures who spent time at Tetlapayac while Eisenstein was there, figures including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Katherine Anne Porter, Elie Faure, Frances Flynn Paine, Hart Crane, and others.  The film becomes a fascinating series of meditations on the mode of history, and particularly on the impossibility of fully apprehending that for which there are only incomplete records—a circumstance that we come to understand describes the entirety of the past, which is never fully gone, but can never be experienced, either.

I’m going to hope to see this film again at some point; it’s exceedingly rich, both visually and thematically, and my poor over-taxed brain simply couldn’t process it.

No screening this morning, so I’ve got a bit more time to recuperate, before re-entering the theater…

A shorter day at documentary bootcamp yesterday; I only caught the beginning of the evening session, as I wanted to get home and relax a bit.  The films are amazing, but the pace is intense, and I needed a bit more downtime.

Anyhow, yesterday’s bill of fare, as far as I made it:

Monday, June 13, 9.00 am

– Ssitkim - Talking to the Dead (dir. Soon-Mi Yoo, 2004, 36 min)

– Exhumations and Inhumations in Guatemala (dir. Emiliana Aguilar, 2001, 16 min)

– Chile, Obstinate Memory (dir. Patricio Guzman, 1997, 35 min)

Monday, June 13, 2.00 pm

– Suite for Freedom (dirs. Caroline Leaf, Luc Perez, and Aleksandro Korejwo, 2005, 15 min)

– Into the Arms of Strangers:  Stories of the Kindertransport (dir. Mark Jonathan Harris, 2000, 122 min)

If there’s anything to be said of yesterday—a very weepy day in the theater—it’s that I think we’ve turned a corner, from unrelieved death and destruction, through exhuming the dead, to tales of escape and survival.  (Suite for Freedom is a project of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.) I’m thinking—or maybe hoping—that we must be on an upswing.  Last night’s crowd at the evening screening was much rowdier than they had been previously, which I attribute to the catharsis produced by the Kindertransport film, a far more traditional, mainstream, big-budget documentary than anything else we’ve seen.  So I’m heading into today in a guardedly optimistic fashion, looking forward to seeing what’s next.

After further thought, I’ve decided that there was something more to last night’s film than I’ve given it credit for, and that the protracted nature of its brutal imagery was up to something more serious than what it seemed, on first glance.  There’s something in the duration of the images, and the length of the film, that forces the viewer to really encounter the horror of war, to move beyond a desire to look away, to understand that desire as a displacement of one’s wish not to see, to produce instead a visceral response to the damage.  To be brutalized, as are those we watch.

Again, or so I think today.  But I was much too wrung out, much too tired and without emotional reserves, to have been able to fully participate and adequately respond last night.

Today continues in a thoroughly draining fashion.  More this evening, if I can manage it.

[UPDATE 6.14.05, 8.27 am: edit to correct stupid day/date mistakes.]

Yesterday was an up-and-down day at documentary boot camp—more up than down, though it ended on a stunningly bad note.

Sunday, June 12, 9.00 am

– El abuelo Cheno y otras historias (dir. Juan Carlos Rulfo, 1995, 30 min)

– Salvador Allende (dir. Patricio Guzman, 2004, 100 min)

Sunday, June 12, 2.00 pm

films from “Selling Democracy:  Films of the Marshall Plan”

– Me and Mr. Marshall (attr. Stuart Schulberg, 1949, 13 min)

– Es Liegt an dir! (It’s Up to You!, dir. Wolgang Kiepenheuer, 1948, 16 min)

– Houen Zo! (Steady as She Goes!, dir Herman van der Horst, 1952, 21 min)

– Nicht storen! Funktionarsversammlung (Do Not Disturb! Meeting in Progress, dir. Hans Herbert, ca. 1950, 16 min)

– Aquila (dir. Jacopo Erbi, ca. 1950, 21 min)

Sunday, June 12, 8.00 pm

– Los Angeles Station (dir. Leandro Katz, 1976, 7.5 min)

– Oh! Uomo (dir. Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, 2004, 71 min)

So, on the up side:  The morning’s program was stunning.  These two films, particularly in sequence, bring the viewer into a sense of first, the importance of memory in giving life significance, and second, the impossibility of measuring the present against idealized memories of the past.  Salvador Allende was particularly stunning, less for its portrait of Allende himself than for Guzman’s sense of alienation and exile, and for the impossibility of confronting the past in a Chile that wants nothing more than to forget.

The Marshall Plan films were, by contrast, more interesting as period pieces than as films; different pieces had different kind of charms, but they were often clunky and obvious.  Aquila was pretty hamfisted, and yet bizarrely fascinating:  The Bicycle Thief gets a job at a refinery, and everything’s okay!

Leandro Katz, in the evening session, gave a fantastic talk about his installations before showing the brief but haunting Los Angeles Station.  This was followed by Oh! Uomo, which was for me the low point of the day.  This film is the third in a trilogy of films about World War I, which repurposes footage of refugees and other people damaged by the war.  Other critics find the film moving, with a substantive message about the horrors of war; perhaps I’d have come to that conclusion, too, if I’d been able to make it all the way through the film.  I was already exhausted and nauseated when it began, though, and when, after 35 minutes of flickery, grainy images of deformed and starving children, and of injured and tormented soldiers, there was suddenly a much too close up image of an eye, clamped open, about to undergo surgery, and then there was a needle—and I could take no more.

I have never before, not once in my entire life, walked out of a film.  I’m a little shocked that I walked out of this one.  But I could not help but feel brutalized by the images, and more than a little angry about it.  I spent my entire walk home, and some time after, trying to piece together a point to all that:  it’s got to be something much more significant, something much more complex than “the brutality of war” in order to make me watch.  Because if there’s nothing more than that—look at the damage that war can do!  Man’s inhumanity to man!—for SEVENTY-ONE minutes, then it seems to me that these lingering images of malnourished and broken babies become about nothing more than shock value, a gratuitous, exploitative means of getting the viewer’s attention.  And where’s the difference between that and Faces of Death?

I’m headed back this morning, though I’m dragging my feet a bit—last night left a very bad taste in my mouth.