Given: The hour

Prove: That professors should not blog late at night.

A good friend and I plan to watch all of North & South tomorrow evening after work. I haven’t watched it in three weeks or so now. It’s been a little longer for her. The main plan is to eat some Indian food, have some great drinks and desserts, and enjoy this little escapade apart from her beloved partner, who, although he’s a good guy, feels he has done his bit with this flick, having now seen North & South enough times to last him for several years.

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I’m reading way too much explicit Guy fan fic. But I’m finally getting a handle on what the appeal is, I think. Adding this topic to the list of things to write about.

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This post is mostly about me and not about Mr. Armitage. I’m sure you’ve seen this stuff, but if not, recently I’ve read a lot of things I enjoyed by guest bloggers at Richard Armitage Fan Blog, and at RAFrenzy and Phylly’s Faves. I’ve still got stuff to write, but admit that the end of Spooks 9 has made that weekly Monday night writing orgy a lot less pressing and frankly, a lot less attractive. I’m not going away, though.

The real issue: writing’s been sparse here because every single one of my students is writing a term paper of between ten and fifteen pages. This activity necessitates hours and hours of meetings on top of normal office hours. It’s fine, I signed up for this, they are writing about subjects that interest me, since they’re enrolled in my classes; I like to see their progress, so it’s even frequently rewarding, and even when it isn’t, it is my obligation, but trying to keep track of dozens of students’ writing means that my own thoughts whir about in my head like bats at times. They’re spiraling upward toward a purpose but they’re not there yet.

I suppose the big thing that is preoccupying me in terms of this blog is the upcoming one-year anniversary of the trigger event that set up my second contact with North & South and the consequent Armitagemania. I need to write about this and I’m not sure how. It was hardly a happy moment and thinking about it still hurts. It will come, I guess, just the way everything else does on this blog: as it comes.

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Humans are all so similar. And yet we are so different. Which distinctions are important, and which are incidental?

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“All the world is a very narrow bridge; the main thing is not to be afraid at all.”

We’re now all hurtling at high speed toward the last day of classes, then winter graduation, then the last day of finals. We have to take lots of deep breaths. The main thing, to misapply the words of Nachman of Breslov, who was not talking about final exams, is not to fear as we all cross the very narrow bridge to the end of the term and the end of the year. We’ll be all right, though hardly any of us believe that right now.

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My student who may be suffering from PTSD is getting a B-minus. Glimpses of brilliance in his written work and conversation both suggest that he’s a much better student than that, but as he said to me today, he can’t really concentrate most of the time. I told him I don’t care what grade he gets but only that he does his best under the circumstances and does not disappoint himself. He’s writing a final paper on the similarities between religious propaganda in the period we’re studying in class and military propaganda today. He has also re-enlisted and is submitting his work in my class early in consequence. He’ll be gone by finals. Destination — he thinks: Afghanistan. I did not ask him how he knows this because I did not want reliable verification that it could be true. When he makes it back, he says, he’ll go to OCS.

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Grant that I may seek to understand. The military is his family. Lord, why is it so pointless to pray for no more deaths?

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Many of our students from India and Pakistan blow off stress by playing pickup games of cricket on the main plaza of the campus in the middle of the night. The speed with which they hurl that ball toward the batter makes this look like a frightening game, one requiring much more skill than baseball. They are very excited and cry out in languages I don’t recognize. But when I have to cross the playing field to walk to my car, they politely stop their game until I’m out of the path of the ball.

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Wills and Kate finally announce their engagement. I, like everyone else, wonder what he thinks about putting her into the difficult position that contributed significantly to the unhappiness and finally the death of his mother. I am glad to hear they are above all friends, and I wish them well. I — undoubtedly like millions of others — remember very clearly the day their parents were married, and the day his mother died.

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Prince William is the same age as my very favorite graduate student, he of the summer paleography lessons.

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I attended our campus madrigal dinner tonight, and I paid for a really nice seat — I’ve never gone, but since I’m leaving in May I decided it was time to go this year or shut it. They sang La, la, la, je ne l’osé dire, of course, how could they not, and the very moving Lord, for thy tender mercy’s sake, but I think what moved me most was hearing them sing Agincourt Carol and Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming. I’ll say that if the only alternative is Afghanistan this is how I prefer to see the baby-faces of 18- to 24-year-olds, innocent, ridiculous, spoofing for a little while longer. They were enjoying themselves and I remembered that camaraderie of arts productions from my own youth.

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In the last two weeks, the most mischievous boy in my confirmation class dropped dead in the parking lot of a superstore near where I grew up, and the female lead of the undergraduate production of Die Fledermaus in which I played clarinet in the pit orchestra died of reasons not listed in her obituary.

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While I was waiting for the dinner to begin I was standing in the foyer to the university’s student union ballroom, a room with impressive wood paneling and decorations, above all medallions of important figures in the institution’s history hand-carved by notable artisans. I was reading the descriptions of them. None of the important figures in the institution’s history, or the notable artists, it seems, were women.

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http://movieclips.com/e/ZvgqQ/ Movie Videos & Movie Scenes at MOVIECLIPS.com

Beautiful music. And you know, beauty is everywhere in the world. Why haven’t I arranged to hear more beautiful music in my life? It made me think of one of my favorite moments in “That Thing You Do,” when Faye (Liv Tyler) dumps Jimmy (Johnathan Schaech). She says, “I have wasted thousands and thousands of kisses on you – kisses that I thought were special because of your lips and your smile and all your color and life. I used to think that was the real you, when you smiled. But now I know you don’t mean any of it. You just save it for all your songs. Shame on me for kissing you with my eyes closed so tight” [watch above].

I’ve been kissing the scholarly world with my eyes screwed shut for ten years. Beauty is available at a price much lower than the one I’ve become accustomed to paying for ugliness. Time to dump the abusive partner. Can I stay resolute?

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Saw the film Four Lions this week. It’s a film about four wannabe jihadis in London. Very, very black humor. At first you think, how stupid; then you find yourself laughing at their incompetence; then you start to find them lovable because you think they will never be terrorists. And then suddenly they start to succeed, and you realize that your heart is caught in your throat — that they’ve tricked you into laughing at horrors, at the frightening ways in which incompetents succeed at their projects — that they’ve tricked you into laughing at the deaths of characters you find lovable.

The scene above is the funniest and the saddest in the film, I think. Fessal is trying to train his pet crow to act a suicide bomber. This is what Mash’Allah means.

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I was taught as a child that humans have no freedom to will the good in any meaningful sense, that every action toward virtue or human salvation had to be willed by G-d first for it to have any effect. But I’ve never understood why G-d wills what G-d wills. Or to put it in the terms of my week, why some kids get to sing sixteenth-century art songs and others fight wars, why some kids come from Central Asia and others go there, why some of us live and others die, why some human lives are so important that millions of people hang on the latest events in them while others are apparently of negligible value, why we voluntarily give up so much in life that is beautiful to engage in the stressful, damaging pursuit of the ugly.

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This time of year my students get all of my rather limited reserve of optimism following my hope that my expressed belief in their projects and my somewhat ragged cheerleading will keep them going even when they find it difficult. If you feel like post this is unreasonably gloomy, do not feel the need to try to comfort me or cheer me up. If I were my brother I’d be unconscious with drink by now. Instead I’ll go to bed. This is self-contempt at Servetus’s best, there’s no solution except to get up tomorrow, and to work again at tikkun olam, though I do not often feel like I succeed in repairing anything. Probably now that I’ve written all this down I should hide it. I’m leaving it here because it’s real and these moods have a lot to do with why I watch Armitage. We all need something beautiful. Even one thing beautiful.

QED: Professors should not blog late at night.

~ by Servetus on November 19, 2010.