Astor Piazzolla

My writing soundtrack lately has been a bunch of stuff by Astor Piazzolla, arguably the greatest tango composer of the past century. He writes complex, textured, jazzy stuff. It's brilliant. A couple of selections:



Libertango - Yo-Yo Ma and, uh, Some Other People
One of my favorite recordings at all time. The cello part is just the bee's fucking knees.



Chin Chin - Astor Piazzolla
Arguably the finest jazz accordion solo you'll ever see. A strange and beautiful song.



Meditango - Moscow Quartet
And another song I love, in a bizarre (Eastern European) musical arrangement. Perhaps one of the best things about Piazzolla is the flexibility of his music, which seems to fill a huge range of possible instrumentations.

Target and Strangeness

In order to actually be ready for our trip, JR and I went on an errand-running trip of epic proportions yesterday. We borrowed KJ's car and more or less spent an entire 9-5 workday amongst the soul-crushing strip malls that form a terrifying ring of consumerism around the suburban outskirts of Madison. In a weird way, it was the most compelling pre-trip thing that we've done so far. More than shopping for coats online, or researching the cost of a Navimag ferry in Patagonia, or booking hostels in Valpo, buying all the little things for our trip was what made it hit home that we were leaving for six months. There was something about buying toothpaste and razor blades and deodorant and Ziploc bags which made this all strike home as being, well, real. The past few weeks have been abstracted and dreamlike and, despite constantly reading travel blogs and trip suggestions on the Internet, I've never been able to put myself there. The research has felt like a mental exercise or a kind of fiction that I've built around myself to preserve my sanity in grad school; but that sense of dislocation, that patina of disbelief that hung around this trip, all that fell away the moment I picked up a bottle of sunscreen and thought to myself, "Just how much sunscreen do I actually need?"

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am lousy at projecting forward. But I'm at the point where I can see myself brushing my teeth in a hostel sink somewhere in Patagonia. And even as that dispels one kind of strangeness - the strangeness of planning for something I can't quite envision - it invites an altogether different one. This new strangeness is much more exciting, though it bears an accompanying sense of anxiety (an anxiety that very easily gets caught up in the usual end-of-semester and pre-holiday anxieties). But it's also made everything here feel even more bizarre.

On an unrelated note, it's snowing again - another 2-4 inches tonight. (That's what she said.) Or maybe that's a related note after all: looking at the snow, all I can think about is the fact that I'm going to a country where it's currently summer. And that the only snow I'll see in the next few months will be on the tops of the Andes. And that I'm happy it snowed so much before I left, because watching snow fall on sparse, gray days reminds me of snow days as a kid and traveling in Germany. Part of me is going to miss Wisconsin. But that part of me is definitely not the toes on my left foot, which are currently frozen due to Thieves poor heating system.

This is Not a Freak-Out

So, I'm sitting in Thieves again, trying to write the remainder of my endless, deliriously-written paper on queens and corpses and tombs and Pygmalion and--HOLY SHIT WHAT AM I EVEN WRITING RIGHT NOW.

But I'm not really writing, because there are two women sitting across the shop from me, and one of them has - and I mean this without any hyperbole - the cutest fucking baby I have ever seen. She's a girl, somewhere between 0 months and 3 years old (I don't know how to gauge baby age). But she's tiny. And happy. And she basically just sits there and smiles and flails her arms about and squeaks. And every once in a while - and this is the best part - her mom hands her a Cheerio out of a bag, which she grabs with both hands and nibbles on very slowly, like a squirrel. It's just plain awesome. But I'm starting to creep out the mother, so I think I'll just pay closer attention to writing this. Cute damn kid, though.

On an unrelated (or is it related? I don't know anymore) note, we're under the two-week mark. As in, two weeks from now, I'll be on a plane careening over Colombia. That thought is giving me increasing horror, as my Big-Ass To-Do List still has pretty much everything on it. And another student just asked me to write him a recommendation. Crap crap crap crap fuck crap fuck fuck crap balls crap nutter butters. (Hello, working at home. My parents are going to kill me for being buried in my books for my first several days back in CT.) Oh, well. I guess it can't be helped.

Well, I'm going to go try to re-center my chi by watching the squirrel-baby some more. Creepiness be damned.

Work Break

Dear god, how had I completely missed this video? I basically live on the Internets, so it alarms me whenever I miss an awesome, Muppet-related, gangsta-rap mash-up. Clearly, I should be on the Internets even more.

Enjoy.

Nutter Butters (See Earlier Post for Reference)

I finished teaching today, which was both great and a little depressing. I liked my students a lot (though not always consistently) and, despite the growing pains of teaching a course for the first time, I was reasonably happy with my classroom performance. There are a lot of things that I'll do differently the next time around (i.e. structure my schedule around specific writing skills rather than these big abstract principles like "personal narrative" and "research"), but I think I communicated at least something to the majority of my students. I'll be interested in seeing my evaluations.

The depressing end of things comes from the fact that I didn't want to give extensive comments on these final portfolios. So, I took a gamble and told my students that they needed to put a self-addressed, stamped envelope in their portfolios if they wanted my feedback. I was thinking that - I don't know - maybe three or four students, tops, would take me up on this. This whole SASE thing is usually a pretty dependable deterrent. But, no. Eight of them included envelopes. Eight. I'm fine with several of these students asking for comments, but - and I'm going to be a complete cynic here - there are quite a few who just want to see their grade on this. Rather than a document envelope (a big orange thing), they gave me regular letter envelopes (a dinky white thing) and asked that I simply send them my comments (read: grade) that I type up and affix to their portfolios. I cry foul because I think most of them will just open the envelope, look at their grade, and toss the letter without reading it - that is, unless they take issue with their grade. And it's an extra three hours of grading that I need to do before I can see the end of my work. Boo.

I'm currently neck-deep in my writing process for my own papers. I'm still on my first one, but I'm hoping that, after spending several weeks compiling and organizing my notes, the writing will just kind of happen. Wing and a prayer. The thought of starting my second paper is already daunting, though, and there's just so much left to do before I fly out on Thursday. I was pretty serene up until this point, but now...now the dark side is taking over. Thus: nutter butters.

...And You Should Maybe Dance a Little Today. To This.

The video is kinda "meh," but the song - oh, the song is catchy as hell.

Dateline: College Library

I'm sitting at one of my preferred late-semester work spots - a booth in the Open Book Café - and taking in the milieu. College Library is a veritable shit-storm of undergraduate annoyingness after 6:00 PM and during finals week, but it is a surprisingly placid place during the late-morning/early-afternoon lull. There's stuff going on around me, but with my headphones in, they just make for white noise (or, rather, the visual equivalent of white noise, whatever that might be).

Occasionally, I'll mute whatever I'm listening to - typically, the soundtrack from The Motorcycle Diaries or an older Röyksopp album, both perennial study albums - and listen to the conversations around me. Today, for some reason, those conversations are almost entirely bad Spanish presentations. I have to fight the incredibly strong impulse to walk over to the table of frat boys next to me and explain how "¿Porqué no creer yo?" does not mean "Why don't you believe me?" (that would be, "¿Porqué no me crees?", douchebags). But I don't. Because it's untoward, and Sigma Chi Retard over there needs to learn an important lesson about how not showing up to class for three weeks has a direct correlation to looking like a dumbass in front one's entire Spanish class. Though I don't like it in my own class, I do like the idea of subjecting bad students to shaming rituals elsewhere.

I probably should shame some of my students, as more than a few of them are writing BAT-SHIT INSANE FINAL PAPERS. Yesterday's presentations were bookended with some real classics. The first student to present, typically one of my better writers, wrote about the similarities and dissimilarities between Barack Obama and - wait for it - Tupac Shakur. He never said why we should compare them and, more problematically, talked more about their similarities than their differences. And you can probably guess what the similarities were. This was followed by eight more or less acceptable presentations. However, the last presentation, complete with a sparkly poster-board thing, was about the history of vampires. THE HISTORY OF VAMPIRES. Holy shit. Holy, holy shit. Really? It turned out to be not terrible - she did not, as I feared, explain how vampires came to exist or how they immigrated to America via pork shipments from Eastern Europe - but there was no argument. None. Thus, it fails the assignment. Very troubling.

I should remind you, gentle Reader, that I am teaching a class on music. With this last project prompt, I gave them permission to go off the reservation and write on a subject that interested/was academically pertinent for them. And some students did just that, producing some great work. My best student, a Horticulture major, did a great piece on the fear of genetically-modified crops; my problem-student-turned-student-I-actually-get-along-with talked about the limits of gene splicing; and my very likable Gambian student made an interesting (though not entirely sound) argument for the legalization of organ sales (body organs, not the other kind). Nothing if not interesting.

But the rest proved that whole "enough rope=noose, self, hanging" axiom. Thank god I don't have to actually comment on their final drafts. I did some damage control today via student conferences and e-mail, but I'm more than mildly concerned that the idea of a "well-reasoned argument" has passed over my students, despite the fact that I spent an entire week discussing and illustrating just that concept. Quite upsetting.

I also met with a student today who more or less argued that, without religion, U.S. society would face inevitable and irreversible decay. (I had to quash the desire to hit him with a copy of Nietzsche's collected works.) What was troubling was that he's typically a thoughtful and intellectually-engaged student - his writing has been problematic but, more often than not, characterized by a desire to engage with his subject in a novel way (a trait often lacking from students here). For him to turn in a logically weak essay rife with quotations from pieces of religiously conservative, far-right propaganda - that was disturbing. It still astounds me to see the extent to which young, intelligent students get suckered into radical intellectual positions like this (on either side of the political divide). Most of our conference ended up being me unpacking the faulty logic that underpins the claims he cites. Luckily, he didn't get overly defensive or confrontational, as a lot of students tend to do in these situations, but I'm not entirely convinced he saw the logical fallacies I pointed out. A vexed encounter, I would say.

Well, back to tombs and corpses and whatnot. I need a big day today, so that I'm not bonered later tonight. But I probably will be. By Ned.

What the End of Semester Feels Like...

Metaphors for My Life Right Now:

-- My pants are on fire, and I'm trying to swat it out with my hands, but then my hands catch on fire, which I try to douse by dunking them in a sink full of water, but the water is actually gasoline and I blow up. Small pieces of me rain down like snowflakes, and children shape those pieces into an ashen snowman that resembles my likeness, which then bursts into flames.

-- I am falling out of an airplane, and the friction from falling causes my head to burst into flames. I pull my parachute, which then bursts into flames and I fall into an active volcano, which then bursts into flames. Also, the volcano is full of lava sharks.

-- I am riding on a train that is going to Awesomeland, but somebody in my car has puked and the odor is slowly filling the car. The windows and doors are nailed shut, and though I try to look ahead and imagine myself in Awesomeland, it's unclear whether it really exists and, if it does, how I'll get out of the train car. Then, all of a sudden, I look down and, oh shit, I'm on fire. [Hint: Awesomeland is a symbol.]

-- I am in a hermetically-sealed room from which the air is being slowly drained. In order to restore air to the room, I need to run on a treadmill, but the more I run, the more oxygen I use. Finally, I become so oxygen-deprived that I drift off to sleep and lie down on the treadmill, which whips my comatose body into the wall. Fires can't start because of the lack of oxygen in the room, but I'm sure that, if there was air, I'd be on fire for some reason.

-- I am a bird that flutters from place to place, picking up bits of string and twigs to build my nest. I spend weeks and weeks doing this, methodically assembling these pieces into a nest. Finally, I finish collecting string, stand back, and look at my nest. What I thought was a nest turns out to be, in fact, a noose. I insert my neck into the noose. The friction from doing so causes my little bird-corpse to burst into flames. I burn on in the night, a beacon of desperation to my fellow birds.


Fun, right?

Book List - The Final Cut

Depending on the amount of space that I actually have, here's what I'm cramming into my backpack, with a brief rationale for each:

Don Quixote by Cervantes
My huge honkin' piece of classic literature for this trip. I've long aspired to read it, and it's pertinent to my academic interests, so I won't feel like a total academic schlub whilst bumming around and drinking wine in Latin America. Though I'm cheating (for now) and reading the Oxford Classics English translation, I'm hoping this will be a springboard into reading the original Spanish version. And, deep down, I'm partly hoping that this will be a conversation starter with some Argentine literati, who will see me reading this in a street café and will then sit down and talk to me and Jessie about trends in world literature and we'll become best friends and they'll invite us to stay at their beach house in Puerto Madryn whenever we want...and...and... (Well, you get the idea.) Edifying in any number of ways.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
I've started this book three times but never read past page 20, mostly because those three times I started it were between the ages of 16 and 18. So help me god, I'm finishing it this time. Another "literary" work, but arguably more entertaining than typical literary fare. And it'll make EV happy to have someone else who gets his obscure references. (There you go, champ.)

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
I have a deep and undying love for Murakami. It's a bit upsetting, but I'm almost done with his catalogue. I went on a bedtime reading kick and made it through a number of his works in the last year (Kafka on the Shore being the best, I'd say). HBW is the last long novel of his I have yet to read. And while Murakami tends to linger on the border between pure entertainment and intellectual puzzling - I have trouble categorizing his work in that way - he is perhaps my favorite living author. And this book looks awesome.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Though SH's Bolaño recommendation, the recently-translated 2666, was a bit too big to fit into my pack, I opted for an earlier work. Bolaño was born in Chile (and returned there to support Allende), so that seems fitting - despite the fact that he had a somewhat vexed relationship with his homeland. More to the point, he's one of the main Latin American literary figures of the last twenty years and, according to some critics, his work evokes Borges (but with a sharper edge).

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
This is my "if I have space" book. I doubt I will, and I think I can easily pick up editions of Borges (in both English and Spanish) while down there, but this is one of the best books I've ever owned. Hurley's translation here is virtually seamless - he renders Borges's work in limpid prose. And Borges's "stories" (I use that term loosely - he does some odd generic things in here) are a delight on any number of levels. I could probably read and re-read his stories endlessly, but - alas - even as a paperback this thing is pretty sizable (and I'm not even factoring in the fact that JR and I need to fit three guidebooks in our packs as well). Le sigh.


That's it for now. I'm pretty sure this is what I'll be bringing, but I also know my own caprice. I should probably write my term papers now, huh?

Every Day is Doomsday from Here on Out

Dear Lord, I don't want to go back to teaching tomorrow. My sleep schedule is still shot to hell, so I'm going to get no sleep tonight. And then I'll probably return to a group of freshmen who will be equally exhausted from the potent combination of holiday travel and Sunday-after-Thanksgiving cramming. They will be uncommunicative and surly, and we're going to have to talk about the abstract concept of "making an argument" vs. "presenting a fact." I already hate them.

I also hate them for the fact that they want to do well in my class, so they're all going to miraculously appear at my office hours this week and next, eating time that I could spend writing my own goddamn papers and such. What they don't know - and what I'm often tempted to tell them - is that I already know what most of them are getting. I have 65% of their grade tallied at this point. Thanks to the ham-handed grading system here at UW, that makes anything beside a major deviation in the final project statistically insignificant. They only have to pass the "Did you royally fuck up this assignment?" litmus test, which for the majority of them consists of only turning in a final project printed in English and covering more than one sheet of paper. That's it. Game over. I'm packing my bags, and I'm out.

Speaking of packing bags...

Today, I occupied the first few useless hours of my day with this site about, well, packing. Seems like it makes sense. Completely useless for stuffing my travel backpack, to be sure, but worth trying out on my trip back to my parent's house. Perusing that took about 20 minutes, so I spent the rest of my time picking through the guy's Annotated Packing List. On the positive end, doing that helped to remind me of some key things I had forgotten to put on my own list: tweezers, a sewing kit, a compass, and - God knows how I forgot it - Band-aids. (I had Neosporin but not Band-aids...WTF.) But the downside was that I got severely depressed for a few hours.

This is the opposite of JR. She gets happy thinking about our trip, because she has the ability to project herself into the future - or, rather, she has the ability to empathize with Future-Jessie. I do not. Future-Kevin is an abstraction to me, someone completely disconnected from me, here, right now, stuck grading freshman writing while his toes slowly freeze in his woefully under-heated apartment. This lack of empathy with a future version of myself is, I also think, a contributing factor to why I procrastinate. Present-Kevin tends to dump a lot of shit on Future-Kevin (just as he's doing right now) simply because he cannot visualize and/or empathize with that future iteration. There you go. Case solved.

So, what I need to invent is a window that will let me look into the past, so that Present-Kevin can look through it and see how miserable Future-Kevin is whilst he comments on awful student concert reviews at 2:30 AM. Why can't science do anything good for me for once?