Saturday XXIX · 27 October 2007

Thursday was the cursed full moon. Orange from the horrible ash of the horrible fires, but so beautiful for it. Like the summer moons back in Montana, when the dust from harvest hangs in the air for weeks.

That day in the sculpture garden, pent up and tense, I passed a professor for whom I worked in the fall of 2003. I corrected exams in Ancient Greek History in order to make my IRA contribution that year. We had catty workload issues at the beginning, him first year on the job and me a union steward with standards to set. Then I saw him lecture on the Peloponnesian War and oh my god. Co-opted owl, right there. In the years since, he’s gone gray (adorable, but shows we’ve both been here a while). He called out in the garden:

“You’re still here? Ha! Did they give you tenure yet?” (Very funny.)

No man. I just… added a second course of study.

Anyway. It’s Saturday. The truth is I’ve had two out of three disastrous weekends in October. Rolling around to a Sunday night walk and finding myself enervated and distant, feeling uselessness in what the previous 48 hours have been. Hmmm: I’ve structured the next two days so tightly that there’s no room for reflection, irritated or otherwise.

Am I trying to hide from something, or just taking the insight from practice that my mind sometimes likes to be bound, needs to be reigned in, and operates better with some structure?

Couplea links before I head out again.

● You know that they’re mutilating the women in Juarez, right? And in Guate. Horrible, sick terror. According to Amnesty, “almost 400 women and girls have been murdered in Mexico…. In Guatemala, 2200 women have been killed since 2001. Exceptional cruelty and sexual violence characterize many of the killings.” For the Day of the Dead (a more intense holiday than Halloween, where we use children to chase away death instead of celebrating it) lots of people are sending home-made crosses to the countries’ consulates, asking yet again for attention to epidemics both countries have basically ignored. Cool project.

● Anthopologists, who take themselves so seriously it hurts, love to issue referenda on this and that cultural issue. They’re guilt-racked, you see, given the disgusting colonialist legacy on which their analytical framework rests. This is why many of them have retreated into lame textual criticism. Anyway, this beyond-ironic thing is happening, and I can’t say I oppose it (for as much as I despise everything GWB has ever done, like the rest of you). Anthrpologists are going out with US troops in Afghanistan to “culturally sensitize” them as they go busting down doors. Of course they’re being pilloried by their colleagues. Here’s the balanced view of the situation I’ve been wanting. 

● It looks like my people are in decline. Awwww. Large NYTM article on the Evangelical Movement. Now there’s a death I can celebrate, but it will have to wait until I actually read this article.

● Looking for a film recommendation for Tuesday night. Last year we went for a walk in the richer parts of Brentwood, where the denizens have had “their” gardeners deck out the houses in the latest and most ostentatious Halloween dress-up, and had “their” nannies do the same with the children. A great show, appropriately decadent. Then watched Terror By Night (1946) with Basil Rathbone as Sherlock. I don’t know what to watch this year. Any gore goes straight into my dreams and terrorizes me, so I’m more looking for artful suspense than horror. Also, for all my comfort with the dark side, there is still latent fear of Christian-style evil (namely, Satan) that just does not need to be primed until my sense of humor has full reign over my subconscious. Any suggestions?

 

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: morality , science , self-deception , social theory

Comment

1. Tuesday night might be good for a pleasant stroll, but don’t be surprised if the trick-or-treaters wait till Halloween (the following night) to start shuffling through the fog…

   Posted by: R · Oct 27, 10:42 AM · #

2. Oops. Of course. I should know that, because my birthday is, at least most years, three days after Halloweeeeeeeeen.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 27, 10:43 AM · #

3. movies (as that’s what I consider myself to officially “study”): how about some old Italian horror flicks like Dario Argento’s “Suspiria”? I don’t RECALL any overt gore, but I could be mistaken.

   Oh btw, that line about “are you tenured yet?” HAH, fabulous!!

   Posted by: patrick · Oct 27, 11:17 AM · #

4. no, no wait, there seems to be gore all over that flick. Dang. Well, ok, how about some of those great Hammer Studios films from the 1950s? Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, Vincent Price, you know, the whole nine yards. Films famous for fake blood and cleavage. If you’re into that kinda thing.

   Posted by: patrick · Oct 27, 11:22 AM · #

5. Don’t Look Now. Directed by Nicolas Roeg. No gore. Can’t be scarier.

   Posted by: knl · Oct 27, 05:19 PM · #

6. I don’t know but what comes to mind is “The Conformist” by Bertolucci circa 69’ or so. Its an appropriately dark treatise on the rise of Facism in 30s Italy. Chase that down with a best of the Stooges retrospective that includes their hilarious escapades in a haunted house right out of “Sunset Boulevard”. I can always make room for Curly especially when I am down. take care,tristan

   Posted by: tristan · Oct 27, 08:06 PM · #

7. having been off the grid for a time what I read last year in Big Sur is a bunch of Pema Chodron. “Start Where You Are”, “When Things Fall Apart” are two goodies. About embracing fear,difficulty and all manner of dislikes and likes and allowing the samsaric nature of life to enlighten and transform and open wide the spaces we so often merely want to shut down or contain. Tonglen practice is a wonder and is a great antidote to New Age greed and commercialism.

   Posted by: tristan · Oct 27, 08:36 PM · #

8. i like that “antidote to new age greed”.

   how about klaus kinski in “nosferatu”?

   Posted by: eeyore · Oct 29, 06:27 PM · #

9. Oh guys, don’t be down. Chins up, Charlie Brown. ( It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! )

   Chodron is amazing and brave. I went to her place one fall, out on the wind-burnished edge of Nova Scotia. Wind in the red leaves around the stupa and whales jumping in the ocean beyond the second-floor windows of the meditation hall. Practitioners there claimed to be too internally focused to notice.

   Here is a link to a short version of Chodron’s way of guiding Tonglen.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 29, 08:20 PM · #

10. I’m feeling so honored to have such great readers, by the way. Thank you all so much for these suggestions. They are every one of them perfectly pitched and those I don’t watch this year will go into the hopper for ’08 and ’09.

    What we’re thinking this year is: a stroll with the neighborhood tricksters then, yes, the Charlie Brown Great Pumpkin feature, which I have never seen. (We didn’t really get TV out on the Ranch when I was small.) Then the main feature, which will either be Nosferatu or KNL’s high 70’s Donald Sutherland tip. And in the meantime I might try to sneak in a reading of The Cask of Amontillado, which is the creepiest thing ever if my adolescent memory serves.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 29, 08:28 PM · #

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