RBOC: Erev Fall Semester 2010 and end of summer reflections

[I’m dumping this out on the page mostly to empty my brain so I can have a successful linear thought. Most is completely non-Armitage-related. Feel free not to read this. More Armitage coverage is coming soon, and Servetus thanks you all for your patience.]

• It’s 103 F outside today. This is a break because yesterday it was 106 F. We’re all adapted to it, by which I mean skilled in avoidance. We try to stay in air conditioned rooms for the worst part of the day, and if we have to walk outside, we have hats and sunglasses and we shuffle in a very leisurely fashion, trying hard not to sweat any more than necessary, because if you enter an air conditioned building with a lot of sweat on your skin it’s easy to catch cold. Those poor construction workers. In the morning, they walk onto campus with ice chests rather than lunch bags. I’m glad no one we know is filming in 100% leather costumes in a polystyrene castle today, because he would not survive this. Under these circumstances, I am not even sure that I would volunteer to run around behind him, sponge the sweat off his brow, and redo his makeup, which I’d definitely volunteer to do in other atmospheric conditions.
• It’s the day before the Fall Term starts, and the campus today is filled with (mostly) first-year students who’ve been told by their mentors and RAs to walk around and find their classrooms ahead of time. (This is a very large campus, with one of the largest student populations in the United States, and the ten- and fifteen-minute pauses between instructional periods are often not really sufficient for students to make it to their classrooms.) They look, as usual,  younger than ever, and scared. I don’t have any intro classes this year at all, so I won’t be dealing with them, but I try to smile kindly when I see a gaggle. In general, my appearance is not very professorial, so they usually smile back. I am not very frightening — until you see my syllabus. Then you run away screaming.
• Though it’s kitschy, reading the Beloit College Mindset List is as always instructive. I find four things on this list noteworthy: most first-year students have not been taught to write cursive (this problem has been growing over the past five years or so — making inclass bluebook exams harder and harder to read); 25% of them have an immigrant parent (this makes me proud of the United States); Nirvana songs are on the classic oldies station (I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on an oldies station for the first time last year and just about fainted); and, probably the most important thing for me: they do not share the defining fear of my adolescence: trepidation about Soviet missile strikes. Which, I would like to point out, never happened. We had an interesting discussion about that in western civ last year. They have no memory at all of the Cold War. The echoes of that conflict I hear when I read about Russia blocking off natural gas lines to western Europe are completely absent for them. As this is a major theme of Spooks, I wonder what they would think of the series if they were to watch it.
• The main thing, of course, is that all of my cultural references get more dated every year. Even Harry Potter is old hat for this crowd. One has to be able to speak Twilight. Uch. I read the first two books and saw the second movie, but I doubt I’ll ever be able to do more than refer sarcastically to it.
• Inspired by comments made during the Spooks 7 Rewatch, I’ve realized that my reading of certain characters that preceded 7, especially Ros, is lamed by not knowing their entire history, so I am now watching all of Spooks from the beginning. Just got to 1.6 — and am watching on discs via netflix — and was flabbergasted at the end. Were they really going to leave me hanging about whether that bomb exploded? This morning, looking on the netflix streaming options, I realized that was the series cliffhanger. Vicious! These episodes are really different in a lot of ways from S7 and S8. Much more humor, much more exploration of the personal lives of the characters, actual plots seem less complicated, indeed less important to the episodes as a whole.
• I’m on record as being annoyed by clumsy historical fictions, but I read three this summer that deserve mention for excellence: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall; A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book; and David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I was especially impressed by Wolf Hall — I’ve felt for a long time that most of what’s to be said about the Tudors has been done to death, but this was something new, and amazingly affecting. Hint to Mr. Armitage’s agents: the last would be an excellent vehicle for him, either in the role of Jacob de Zoet in a film, or as an audiobook opportunity.
• Finally picked up The Sunne in Splendour. I thought I must have read this while I was in high school, but now I am almost certain I have not. I’d never have forgotten these amazingly touching scenes at the beginning in a million years. Thinking about this as a favorite book of Mr. Armitage Sr. and Mr. Armitage our hero is definitely interesting. (Admittedly, for me the thought of having a father who reads is already a bit of a stunner — let alone one who reads stuff like this.)
• I’ve felt for the last few years that there were various soundtracks running in the back of my head. This used to happen occasionally (for example, in the fall of 1998 all I heard in my mind was the first movement of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony), but lately it seems to happen constantly. Last Spring, it was Keane, Perfect Symmetry. This summer, Le Vent du nord, Dans les airs. I am starting to think that this fall it will be Kate Nash, Made of Bricks. This is the song I am singing as I shuffle carefully across campus the last few days (warning for the s-word):
• I have two resolutions for the fall: to avoid as much possible the tendency to fall into sin; and to be as kind as I can to the people around me. (Yes, I realize that both of these goals will be contravened if “The Shit Song” becomes the soundtrack for the Fall.) I realize this sounds hopelessly religious, but due to my childhood, it’s how I think.
• Which I suppose brings me to the last point before the long overdue obsession update: our academic year starts tomorrow and the Jewish New Year begins week after next. The confluence of those two things has tended to be more important in my life than the more intensively celebrated solar New Year, and though this blog is only six months old, it was at about this time last year that I saw Richard Armitage for the first time, as Mr. Thornton in North & South. Es hat mich nachdenklich gestimmt, so that’s where I am going next — obsession update.

~ by Servetus on August 24, 2010.