[UPDATE, 6.14.05, 8.28 am:  edit to correct stupid day/date mistake.]

This week, the 51st Robert Flaherty Film Seminar is being held here in town, and so I’m embroiled in what feels a bit like boot camp, a dawn to well-after-dusk schedule of screenings, discussions, and social events.  The seminar keeps up this pace for seven days, which, given my usual tendency to play hooky from a conference on or about the third day, seems a bit grueling; for better or for worse, though, I’m only at the seminar through Wednesday, as Thursday I zip to Louisiana for my reunion.

Anyhow, I’m not going to blog the seminar in any extensive way, but I am at least going to attempt to keep some kind of record of what I’ve seen.

Saturday, June 11, 8.00 pm

– untitled part 3b:  (as if) beauty never ends (dir. Jayce Salloum, 2002, 11 min)

– Retrato Oficial (dir. Francisca Duran, 2003, 1 min)

– Silence (dir. Orly Yadin and Sylvie Bringas, 1998, 11 min)

– Death Day in Mexico (dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1934, 16 min)

– okay bye-bye (dir. Rebecca Baron, 1998, 39 min)

A quick update on that music meme there:  I’ve discovered another excellent way to keep up with the hip kids and their music—serve as thesis advisor for the radio station’s music director.  I got some great recommendations from him that I’ll be checking out over the weekend, and will post more about here soon after.

Also, on Dennis Lehane:  I ended up not reading Mystic River on my flight after all, because I couldn’t find my copy of it.  I thought I’d brought it to DC.  In fact, I thought I had a copy of it at all.  I’m completely baffled—if I had it, it’s totally walked off.  The good news is that I found a copy of the elusive Gone, Baby, Gone in the Houston airport.  So once I finish the Elmore Leonard I’m reading, I’m on to that one.

And, on being home:  Good lord, but I love this condo.  That is all.

I just got what is without question—and by an astronomical degree—the WORST set of teaching evaluations I’ve ever gotten.  These come from my graduate cultural studies seminar, which I will here admit I totally phoned in all semester.  The overload was simply too much, and I found myself repeatedly putting that class last, as I think any reasonable person in my situation would have.  (And no fair responding that any reasonable person wouldn’t have taken on the overload.  You’d certainly be right, but there’s no point harping on it.) My students picked that up, and really slaughtered me.

I’m alternating between two responses here, one which is a little bruised and one which is a bit more indignant.  The latter response comes from my sense, given the comments, that this seminar expected to be taught in a way that graduate seminars simply aren’t, and that some measure of my hands-off approach (admittedly too hands-off) was intentional, designed to force the students to develop their own responses to the material.

But whatever.  I forgot the third response, in which I can’t quite bring myself to care very much.  My relationship with the grad school is a pretty exploitative one (them of me, not me of them), and if they decided not to ask me to teach for them any more, it would come as a huge relief.  Perhaps there are moments when doing a bad job is called for.

My old pal BT passed me this musical-meme baton a while back, but I not only managed to let the damned thing drop, I kinda stopped in my tracks, hands on hips, staring at it, thinking “whaddaya want me to do with that?”

Not really.  But I have hitherto failed to pick up the baton for two key reasons:  first, a deep resistance to internet memes, one that much mirrors my hatred of those “send this email to everyone you know” messages, no matter how well-intended the point it’s trying to make.  I often find other folks’s responses to said memes interesting, or revealing, or amusing, but have never really been sufficiently engaged by the questions to take it up myself.

That’s one.  Two is this line, in BT’s baton-passing:

Kathleen, because I know I’ll buy something she names…

Now, I know his intent was nothing but complimentary, and I’m indeed gratified that he has such faith in my musical taste.  But I’m a bit unnerved, too—what if my answers don’t measure up to the lead-in?  What if I finally reveal my true tastes to be pedestrian and—good lord—even popular?  What if I have to admit that I’m usually a year behind the cool kids, and that I find the stuff I like through “people who bought this also bought” links at Amazon.com and references to bands on my students’ LiveJournals?

[Incidentally, watch my students squirm now:  Whose LJs am I reading?  What embarassing things have they unknowingly revealed?  Rest assured, if I’m reading your LJ, and I know who you are, I like you and your writing, or I wouldn’t bother.]

Anyhow, while I’m killing time in the Houston airport, I’m putting all such anxiety aside, sucking it up, and entering the meme:

1.  The person (or persons) who passed the baton to you:

Just in case you weren’t paying attention, that’d be BT.

2.  Total volume of music files on your computer:

2831 songs, 8.2 days, 13.65 GB.

3.  The title and artist of the last CD you bought:

CD?  As in actual music-on-disc?  That would be We Are Scientists’ EP, The Wolf’s Hour, and Bishop Allen’s Charm School.  (Am I reading that right?  Used and new from $98.98?  Good grief.  If you can’t find it from a more reputable source, drop me a line.  Not that I’d ever burn you a copy or anything.)

If, however, this includes the purchase of music in non-tangible forms, add in Calexico’s Feast of Wire, Neko Case’s Blacklisted, The Zutons’ Who Killed the Zutons?, and Belle and Sebastian’s Push Barman to Open Old Wounds.

4.  Song playing at the moment of writing:

Right this very second:  Ben Folds, “Trusted,” off of Songs For Silverman.

5.  Five songs you have been listening to of late (or all-time favorites, or particularly personally meaningful songs):

According to iTunes, my most-played songs are a bunch of Fountains of Wayne (off of Utopia Parkway), followed by Bach’s Goldberg Variations.  Go figure.  This only includes the stuff actually played off the computer, though; if I could get a count off the iPod, Fountains of Wayne would no doubt remain high (it’s great running music), and Franz Ferdinand, Ben Folds, Cake, and Barenaked Ladies would join them up there (same reason).

That’s just frequency, though.  If I were to go for things that capture my particular obsessions, right at the moment…

(a) Barenaked Ladies, “Go Home.” Okay, yeah, it’s the cotton candy of music—sickly sweet melt-in-your-mouth fluff.  But it’s a good running mood-booster, and frankly I’d email R. this song on a weekly basis, if it’d get him on a plane.

(b) Bishop Allen, “Things Are What You Make of Them.” This is one catchy damn song, but its catchiness is belied by its getting-left melancholy.

(c) Joni Mitchell, “The Last Time I Saw Richard.” How romanticism passes into jadedness, which is its own special kind of romanticism.

(d) Pete Yorn, “Life on a Chain.” Something about the bleed between the opening phone-call sound and the polished, up close, studio sound still has me.

(e) The Postal Service, “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight.” Ahem.

I’m going to refrain from passing the baton on to anyone else, as I’m so utterly belated with this, but would love to hear responses from you—what should I be listening to that I’m not?

As evidenced by yesterday’s meandery post, I’ve been trying over the last few days to face my sense of directionlessness, thinking through it as something other than a crisis, or a cause for alarm, but nonetheless trying to get at its roots and figure out how wandering might resolve, at some future moment, into organized movement.

This has not been an ideal moment for such introspection; the weekend just past was my last weekend in DC, and so R. and I had a bit of an overflow of festivitizing, or at least a bit more than allows for unclouded thinking on the following day.  But I’m pretty sure that some portion of my fogginess is a hangover from the BR trip, as well.  There’s nothing like dealing close-up with a parent’s pain to cast the shadow of mortality over everything.

Oddly, the story I’m spending this summer gearing myself up to tell, in whatever form I wind up telling it, is in part about the death of a parent, and yet it seems that the intimations of the someday-way-into-the-future death of my own actual parent have so overwhelmed the fictional urge as to make it impossible to concentrate.

Some clarification is perhaps in order here:  my mother’s surgery was elective, but left her in completely incapacitating pain, pain into which, for the first day, serious meds knocked only the smallest of dents.  The meds left her extremely disoriented, though, and thus further incapacitated.  And despite the fact—the fact, I keep reminding myself—that she was never in any mortal danger, never even close to needing further medical attention, somehow the combination of her pain and her delirium seriously Freaked Me Out.  It was like seeing the leading edge of that tidal wave that you know is coming—given the general histories of women in my family, it likely won’t hit for at least a couple of decades yet, but it’s coming nonetheless, like it or not.

And it’s impossible not to begin asking, when that wave hits, where will I be, and where will I be left?  My father is still alive, but we’re hardly in touch—I’ve taken to joking of late that he’s off in the desert, stockpiling canned goods and waiting for the end times.  (A joke, I now see, that originated in the post to which I link.  Well, at least if I’m being derivative, it’s myself I’m deriving from.) More seriously, for at least the last fifteen years, whenever I’ve referred to “my parents,” I’ve meant to signal my mother and stepfather; my father does not figure in.  (Indeed, one of the last times I saw him, I freudian-slippingly said something about how I resembled “my side of the family” rather than his.)

So there’s that.  And then there’s my stepfather:  though he and I get along quite well now, there have been some exceedingly difficult moments between us, things that keep us from ever really being close.  The sheer fact of the matter is that, given his own family history, he’s likely to die long before my mother.  But even putting that aside, the end result of all the interpersonal subtraction is clear:  my mother is, for all intents and purposes, my only parent, and when she’s gone, what’s left?

Despite the enormous jumbled mess of folks that I casually refer to as my family (mostly steps of various sorts), my actual family does not stretch far beyond her.  There’s my sister, of course, but she and I do a lousy job of keeping in touch—we’re always happy to see or talk to one another when we do, but we don’t do so very often, and so aren’t in some basic sense on one another’s radar screens.  And there’s R., my perfect love, but given the difference in our ages, it’s almost certain that someday he’ll be gone, too.

As he’d no doubt point out, my greatest terror, the one that most clouds my judgment and interferes with my rational decision-making processes, is that of being left.  And I’m beginning to suspect, as I write this, that what I’ve spent the weekend drinking away, what is preventing me from thinking and working today in the way that I’d hoped to, is last week’s snapshot of the future, an inevitable future in which everyone I love is gone and I am, in some terminal sense, on my own.

Part of me has spent my entire life preparing for (indeed, making way for) this future:  I moved out of my parents’ house at 16; I’ve moved across the country, away from R., three times in fifteen years; I keep friends and colleagues at a distance—all of this as if to ensure that the alone that I find myself in is an alone of my creation.

And here enter the maudlin strains of Simon and Garfunkel.  Sigh.  It’s just flat hard to take oneself this seriously.

So the basic gist:  mom’s pain, visions of mortality, fear of abandonment, I am a rock, I am an island.  The question becomes what to do with all that.  To quote John Barth (though on a very different kind of anxiety), “one way to handle such a feeling might be to write a novel about it.” Another might be to write a whiny blog post, to get it out of your system, and to move the hell on.

So as I’ve mentioned before, this is the summer I finally get to reap the benefits of having gotten tenure; I’m free to think, to read, to explore as I see fit.  The thing about such freedom, though, is that it can be disorienting, particularly for somebody who has spent the last twelve years in a world filled with deadlines and hurdles.  The disorientation is somewhat chosen, though; I think I might know what direction I’ll ultimately be headed in, but I don’t want to strike a course prematurely.  I want to wander, to figure out what’s out there—to play a bit before setting a new goal.

I’m reading a bunch of crime fiction, and also a bunch of blogs, and I’m sketching out some ideas for a new project in the broadest possible terms.  I’ve learned a thing or two about a couple of software packages, and plan on learning more once I get back to California.  I’ve got a slew of toys to order, and to play with once they arrive.

All of this is good, but it’s leaving me feeling a bit fuzzy.  Unfocused.  I’m certain that that’s a good thing, at least in the long term, but right now it just feels weird.

A former student of mine, Adam Graham-Silverman, recently spent five weeks in Mozambique as an International Reporting Project Fellow, through Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies.  Some of the results of that project were published last week, in a four-part series on Slate.com.  Adam’s report takes an unflinching look at what the Bush administration’s “Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief” is and isn’t accomplishing in a country in which nearly ten percent of the adult population is thought to be infected.

[UPDATE, 6.7.05, 9.30 am:  I meant to update this day before yesterday, and just let it get away from me:  Adam informs me that it’s actually fifteen percent of the adult population that’s thought to be infected.]

The return, thus far, is going more smoothly than the venture out.  For one thing, this is perhaps the first time that I’ve traveled at entirely reasonable hours—neither getting up well before dawn nor getting in after my usual bedtime—in years.  I’m awake and mostly well-rested.

Mostly.  This was not a restful jaunt home, alas.  Marcus’s opening last night was fabulous, if attended by a very odd segment of the population.  The best part, aside from hanging out with him a bit, was that I bought a big-ass painting, which you can find on his website via the “paintings” link—the image on the resulting page that provides the link to “free-hanging canvases” (and the first image once you follow that link) is my new baby:  Un travail sur la matière.  The painting itself will remain in the gallery until the show comes down in early July.  Once it arrives, and is hung, I’ll have to take a new round of condo pictures, to update my own gallery.

Anyhow, that was the fun part of the trip.  Less fun was that my mother had some pretty intense surgery the day after I arrived—really intense, leaving her in enormous pain, but not so intense that it wasn’t done at a freaking ambulatory surgery center rather than in the hospital.  There was absolutely nothing ambulatory about her condition, an hour and a half after being stitched up, when they rolled her back out to the car and waved goodbye.  I’ve accordingly spent the last three days in various aspects of caring for her, some of them icky, some of them alarmingly intimate, some of them back-breaking.  The result was both that I spent less time with Marcus than I’d hoped, and that I’m now quite wrung-out, and need a bit of rest.  I foresee a day tomorrow of sleeping-in, going to the gym, and lying around reading novels.