JOURNAL: EMPTY NOTES, HISTORICAL REFERENCES, ***MY DESK***

I received an email sent in 1969. That was what my inbox told me earlier this morning. It said their was no sender, no message, but someone was trying to reach me in 1969. Later on, when my inbox woke up a bit more it pretended that had never happened, corrected itself by showing me an email sent last night from a service I subscribe to. I want the first message back.

In 1969 my Dad was in France or Belgium, my Mom was in Salt Lake, my sister and I and many of the people I know were still spirits and star dust spread across time and space. Also, the first Led Zeppelin album was released, the Soviet Union was sending space craft out towards Venus, Nixon took office, passenger railroad lines were closing, Elvis was making a comeback, the last Saturday Evening Post was published, the Beatles gave their last public performance, trials are being held on the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Harvard students are rioting, there's secret bombing in Cambodia, not secret bombing in Vietnam, and Charles de Gaulle is voted out of French presidency.

I remember reading about that, Charles de Gaulle being ousted, as a research assistant in university. I was reading the London Times looking for things that might have inspired Monty Python sketches. This past summer my French employer talked about Parisians, the youth, rioting in the streets, throwing pavets/cobblestones. I asked him if he'd been part of it guessing the correct answer that he hadn't. He was never much for joining in, never fit with the crowd like that, he told us. I learned from the London Times that this was the same era in which England was making a bid to join the EU but France was really not in favor of admitting them. There was also an article about an eye doctor who felt that sunglasses were dangerous and would become habit forming.

Everything comes back to Monty Python.

Anyway, as for present updates, my house is lovely, the people in it are perfect, this city is marvelous, I'm making a desk and am obsessed with this one fact, I will soon be starting a job that may last longer than two months, the rain has started, and for the remainder of this day which will be spent working on my desk, cooking, and crocheting, I will be imagining someone in 1969 trying to contact me, somehow magically getting access to email but in a bittersweet twist the technology can't handle the timewarp.

How are you?

some stars don't align but then the academy of motion pictures hits them over the head

and drags them back to the cave.

I don't know either.

Strangely enough, I don't like the way e e cummings reads his own poetry. How do you feel about that? I love his work but would read it entirely differently than the man who's work it is. Art history is alive.

Yes, I have listened to B.o.B's Don't let me fall on repeat since I got home from my last Monty Python class ever. Do you know I now find MP extremely comforting? If I've learned something this year it's how important silliness is. Aich (H), if we don't (a) take ourselves too seriously, (b) see a lot of terrible things, (c) make a lot of mistakes, and (u)mm... I should've stuck with three.


Three more classes, my dears.


Three classes
Some papers
Some ambiguous finals
Editing one documentary

call me pretentious. i am. but if you buy me five quinces I'll make us both happy.

To go back to the Pudderida fiasco:

Tonight in my "Great Films" class we watched a straight-up bit of surrealist film that historically made Salvador Dali jealous. Really. Apparently when it was being screened he kicked over the projector. So imagine watching a film that would make Dali green and then a subsequent discussion over what is art.

What is art?

That time old question. A little voice whispers in your ear to ignore it and enjoy a good honest rustic piece of pie instead. Like this one:

Quince Bisquit pie from Lottie+Doof

But no. We fall into the trap, back to rice pudding postmodern theory because defining what qualifies as art is my new favorite metaphor to explain structuralism/the silliness of structuralism (I was referencing structuralism and Claude Levi-Strauss here). So the definitions of art used to be pretty rigid (now is not the time to argue about whether rigidity remains, good/bad etc). There were these pompous yet possibly sincere academy/salons in France that set the rules about what was art.

You may have seen this little piece, The Gleaners by Millet, before:

It was rejected by the Louvre.
Yeah, they were rigid.

Anyway, things get crazy with radicals like Courbet, Manet, Monet, and Cezanne. Don't blink there's the Salon des Refusés, Picasso, and people putting urinals on pedestals. All hell is breaking loose. Hide ya kids, hide ya wives, hide ya husbands too because the artists are having their say and then, rewind. The Gleaners. Not art. Art now but not art in 1857. Structuralists say language makes sense of the world for us, it's our mediator. Nobody is literally in contact with reality. So crazy things can happen like the Louvre rejecting aforementioned painting?

But here's an even greater example of where structuralism may get you (specifically the scene at 7min16:



Therefore we can conclude that structuralism leads to Jerry Lewis and Monty Python.
Second and open-ended conclusion: Is this where higher education gets you?

jacque-ice pudderrida

I frequently want to dunk my head in a barrel of water to drown out all the theorists. Last night I was at a dinner party where Jacques Derrida was brought up over rice pudding. Yeah, I was thinking, "Oh noooooooo," too.

J.D. lead to referencing this obnoxious thing that some people came up with at some point. You get no more specifics than that because I'm so tired of dropping names. It's like if I knew anything about sports I could now draw a terrible metaphor to people who frequently do things like fumble. People fumble in croquet, right? (I'm going to come back to that later.) So this obnoxious thing: we know things, not from experience, but from talking about experience. So it's not so much that this weekend I was at a dinner party, it's that I have this phrase "dinner party" to describe this event. And "dinner party" conjures an image in your mind not so much because you yourself have been a member of a dinner party, but because after thoroughly digesting your Peking duck, the next day you met Ethel for tea where you discussed the various members of the dinner party and how atrocious it was when Bertie had clam juice dribbling down his chin. We're getting nitpicky here and saying that you'd still be an ignorant lump if we didn't have language to explain what happened to us. (That is, if I'm properly understanding the words and ideology people fling around.) Which is kind of genius. And kind of asinine.

Now we can rewind a few years to when I was in a class where my mates were trying to ascertain from the T.A. just what kind of papers we were supposed to be writing. At the time I thought the T.A. was not understanding the questions people were asking as he kept waving his arms and saying, "It's all semantics." I laughed then and now I laugh harder. One could say it was all semantics.

So saying things like fumbling and croquet in the same sentence brings up something else that happened at the dinner party. The rice pudding was a bit runnier than what is generally considered pudding (though still good). I facetiously suggested that we could add potato flakes. Five minutes later I realized that some people might have thought I was serious. Which caused me to (a) wonder if I'm becoming my father and (b) reflect upon how I have a growing respect for Monty Python and Bakhtin's interpretation of carnivalesque humor.

I can't believe the mumbo jumbo that comes out of my mouth/typtastic-fingers these days.

(pretty rice pudding picture taken from smitten kitchen, a very yummy blog.)   

they do exist!

Filmic classes may be four hours long but we're given lots of breaks. And in these breaks sometimes I feel like I've gotten in the middle of an Old Boys Club meeting. I could join in–I mean I haven't been geeking out over Monty Python my whole life so I don't necessarily recognize every reference made and maybe I won't have a lot of input–but there's this strange mode of communication going on. First of all, there is a distance of at least five seats and one row in between every participating male. Secondly, they are all coming to the feeding ground from a different direction that I don't recognize and can't define. And maybe I become mildly confused because I've stumbled into an oasis of stereotypicality. At these points I roll my eyes and look for something productive to do rather than jaw the fat around a chess game that's going nowhere. By productive I mean I draw paisley patterned circles around things I want to research when I get home.