 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Monday, the doctoral student I advise passed his qualifying exam with the proverbial flying colors, using the techniques I imparted to him to excellent effect. Tuesday, another advisee passed her M.A. exam. She also made good use of my advice on how to handle the pressure of the event. Wednesday, I spent the five hours before teaching meeting with a series of students I mentor, all of whom had produced better thinking than I would have expected when I first encountered them. Thursday, I held office hours all day after getting up at 5am, managing not to lose the thread of my ritual advice-giving. And today, Friday, the two students whose Honors theses I directed this semester presented their work at the Department's end-of-year reception to much acclaim while a third student, who had delayed turning in her thesis from last spring, came to see me, pleased that I'd continued to work with her during a difficult time and relieved to have finally completed the requirements for her degree. I'm exhausted, but also proud of the work my students have done and, a rarity for me, of the work I did helping them to realize their potential. Tags: autobiography, everyday, work
Current Location: 85704
Muse: "It takes strength to be gentle and kind. . ."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
After a week of notable birthdays, including Marx, Freud, Orson Welles, Willie Mays, myself and also my great friend Annalee Newitz, who celebrated the twentieth cumpleaños of our acquaintance yesterday, it is now Thomas Pynchon's fête. The author of my all-time favorite book The Crying of Lot 49, as well as close runner-up Vineland and the awesome Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon also wrote a trenchant piece on Los Angeles in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots that serves as the perfect counterpoint to the Southern California presented in his fiction: Feelings range from a reflexive, angry, driving need to hit back somehow, to an anxious worry that the slaying is just one more bad grievance, one more bill that will fall due some warm evening this summer. Yet in the daytime's brilliance and heat, it is hard to believe there is any mystery to Watts. Everything seems so out in the open, all of it real, no plastic faces, no transistors, no hidden Muzak, or Disneyfied landscaping or smiling little chicks to show you around. Not in Raceriotland. Only a few historic landmarks, like the police substation, one command post for the white forces last August, pigeons now thick and cooing up on its red-tiled roof. Or, on down the street, vacant lots, still looking charred around the edges, winking with emptied Tokay, port and sherry pints, some of the bottles peeking out of paper bags, others busted.
A kid could come along in his bare feet and step on this glass--not that you'd ever know. These kids are so tough you can pull slivers of it out of them and never get a whimper. It's part of their landscape, both the real and the emotional one: busted glass, busted crockery, nails, tin cans, all kinds of scrap and waste. Traditionally Watts. An Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia spent 30 years gathering some of it up and converting a little piece of the neighborhood along 107th Street into the famous Watts Towers, perhaps his own dream of how things should have been: a fantasy of fountains, boats, tall openwork spires, encrusted with a dazzling mosaic of Watts debris. Next to the Towers, along the old Pacific Electric tracks, kids are busy every day busting more bottles on the street rails. But Simon Rodia is dead, and now the junk just accumulates.
A few blocks away, other kids are out playing on the hot blacktop of the school playground. Brothers and sisters too young yet for school have it better--wherever they are they have yards, trees, hoses, hiding places. Not the crowded, shadeless tenement living of any Harlem; just the same one- or two-story urban sprawl as all over the rest of L.A., giving you some piece of grass at least to expand into when you don't especially feel like being inside.
In the business part of town there is a different idea of refuge. Pool halls and bars, warm and dark inside, are crowded; many domino, dice and whist games in progress. Outside, men stand around a beer cooler listening to a ball game on the radio; others lean or hunker against the sides of buildings--low, faded stucco boxes that remind you, oddly, of certain streets in Mexico. Women go by, to and from what shopping there is. it is easy to see how crowds, after all, can form quickly in these streets, around the least seed of a disturbance or accident. For the moment, it all only waits in the sun.
Overhead, big jets now and then come vacuum-cleanering in to land; the wind is westerly, and Watts lies under the approaches to L.A. International. The jets hang what seems only a couple of hundred feet up in the air; through the smog they show up more white than silver, highlighted by the sun, hardly solid; only the ghosts, or possibilities, of airplanes.
From here, much of the white culture that surrounds Watts--and, in a curious way, besieges it-- looks like those jets: a little unreal, a little less than substantial. For Los Angeles, more than any other city, belongs to the mass media. What is known around the nation as the L.A. Scene exists chiefly as images on a screen or TV tube, as four-color magazine photos, as old radio jokes, as new songs that survive only a matter of weeks. It is basically a white Scene, and illusion is everywhere in it, from the giant aerospace firms that flourish or retrench at the whims of Robert McNamara, to the "action" everybody mills long the Strip on weekends looking for, unaware that they, and their search which will end, usually, unfulfilled, are the only action in town. That bit about the "ghosts, or possibilities, of airplanes" gets me every time. Someday soon, I need to make a pilgrimage to the Watts Towers and tilt my head skyward as the cone of sound engulfs me. Tags: autobiography, friends, holiday, literature
Current Location: 85704
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Here's my version of a traditional central Italian "midnight snack" pasta: • Cook spaghetti until toothily al dente, then tossing with a little olive oil after it has been rinsed off and transferred to a bowl
• While the pasta is cooking, begin simmering anchovies -- I used two standard-sized cans -- in olive oil
• Add crushed red pepper and garlic to taste
• As the mixture starts to thicken to the point of not sliding easily across the bottom of the man, add a little white wine to deglaze it, turning down the heat until the sauce is barely bubbling
• Toss in a few handfuls of raisins and about half as many capers
• Add the juice of two lemons
• As the sauce thickens to the consistency you desire, grate pecorino romano cheese
• Once everything is done, sprinkle the cheese over the pasta liberally, then toss with the anchovy-raisin-caper sauce
• Try not to eat as much as I did tonight Although the combination of salty, sweet and sour flavors might not seem like a good match for the cheese to some, I was overwhelmed by the heady savor of the combination. Tags: everyday, food, recipe
Current Location: 85704
Muse: a memory of the aria from La Wally that is featured in Diva
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The whole of May 6th was marked by demonstrations which turned into riots in the afternoon. The first barricades were thrown up at the Place Maubert and defended for three hours. At the same time fights with the police were breaking out at the bottom of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, at the Place du Châtelet, and in Les Halles. By the early evening the demonstrators numbered more than ten thousand and were mainly holding the area around the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where they had been reinforced only after 6p.m. by the bulk of the march organized by the UNEF at Denfert-Rochereau. On May 8th Le Monde wrote: What followed surpassed in scope and violence everything that had happened throughout an already astonishing day. It was a kind of street fighting that sometimes reached a frenzy, where every blow delivered was immediately returned, and where ground that had scarcely been conquered was just as quickly retaken. . . There were dramatic and senseless moments which, for the observer, seemed rife with madness. And on May 7th L'Aurore noted: "Alongside the demonstrators could be seen bands of young hoods ( blousons noirs) armed with steel bars, who had come in from the outlying areas of Paris to help out the students." The fighting lasted until after midnight, especially at Montparnasse.  For the first time cars were overturned and set afire, paving stones were dug up for the barricades, and stores were looted. The use of subversive slogans, which had begun at Nanterre, had now spread to several parts of Paris. Insofar as the rioters were able to strengthen the barricades, and thus their own capacity for counterattack, the police were forced to abandon direct charges for a position strategy which relied mainly on offensive grenades and tear gas. May 6th also marked the first intervention of workers, blousons noirs, the unemployed and high school students who that morning had organized important demonstrations. The spontaneity and violence of the riots stood in vivid contrast to the platitudes put forth by their academic initiators as goals and slogans. The very fact that the blousons noirs had fought in the streets shouting "The Sorbonne to the students!" marked an end to an entire era. Tags: collage, history, nostalgia, politics, theory
Current Location: 85704
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
From Karl Marx, Grundrisse-- The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to the greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clans. Only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil society', do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a "political animal," not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of a society. Production by an isolated individual outside society -- a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness -- is as much of an absurdity as the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other. Tags: holiday, politics, theory
Current Location: 85704
Muse: Celestialis - Deepchord Presents: Echospace - The Coldest Season
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
No longer in a relationship with the meaning of is, baby. Tragedy is always a bait and switch. Updated, anticipated. My profile hides my lazy I while yours mixes metaphors under London Bridge. Which? Boys are dying for the tingle of salt on their tongues. You heard me right. The word wasn't what it was when I circled the windy lake, sand hilling up like a documentary about the Dust Bowl. Face the music, darling, you're an open book when the flame turns your thin milk to bone. Tags: music, poetry
Current Location: 85704
Muse: 5-4=Unity - Pavement - Crooked Rain Crooked Rain: LA's Desert Origins
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
PREVIOUS 
