Time Travel, Telekinesis, Oh My!

We went to see the movie Looper last night, a movie by Rian Johnson, featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt...and Bruce Willis of all people!  As the The New York Times' review suggests, the movie is first and foremost about time travel.  I liked that it is set thirty years in the (near) future, which reminds me of Octavia Butler's novels.  Scientists say that this kind of time travel is not necessarily impossible either (except that whole thing about how the universe would collapse if you traveled into the past rather than the future).

There was some funny dystopian humor thrown into the mix too; about 10% of the population has a mutant Telekinesis gene (TK), but it's only powerful enough to allow people to perform tricks like circling coins in the air.  I respected these doses of humor since that can be hard to do (or worse, uninteresting) in a high suspense apocalyptic drama.

It's not only driven by suspense, the emotional drive of the film is rooted in pop-psychology notions of love in which most human violence stems from not getting enough love from Mom and Dad.   I don't want to give too much away in the movie, but the lack of mothers raising their children undergirds the logic of the plot.  That was a little over-stated for my liking, but it didn't make the film less enjoyable...in fact, the attempt at emotion (and an off-handed remark about an "affective" clothing choice) scored big points with me.  

Joseph Gordon-Levitt's acting was a big part of what I think made the movie work.  I've held a grudge against him for a while because of his role in 500 Days of Summer (I really did not like that movie, AT ALL), but after seeing Mysterious Skin and now this performance, I'm over it.  I think he's got some talent.

If you are interested in time travel, dystopia, or action flicks (or films about mommy and daddy issues?), I recommend it:

Phatic

I learned this new word today: phatic.  It means "to denote or relate to language used for general purposes of social interaction, rather than to convey information or ask questions."  I love that the dictionary uses "hello, how are you?" as an example of it.  Because the truth is, most of us are completely uninterested in how you are when the question is asked.

Currently, a fascinating trend of "phatic language" is happening in our culture because of Facebook, etc...and someone wrote a dissertation about it!  It turns out that social media has significantly reshaped phatic language and the way we use it.  What is fascinating about this study is that it shows that "information-less" posts are not meaningless.  These random status updates and dinner photos are an increasingly important part of our current public discourse and expression of emotion.

It turns out that "phatic communication" keeps people better connected with one another and represents an increasingly important aspect of social interactions, especially now that so much of one's community is online and not just in the place where one lives.

Of course, there is one person who saw the meaning in phatic language without writing a dissertation on it (although he did have a PhD in psycholinguistics).  How ARE you, Tobias Funke?

Shout Outs

Shout Outs are something that I grew up with and thought were really cool.  You know, radio personalities, friends on the playground, whatever, it was cool to get a shout out...not always an explicit one but something that acknowledged a shared moment or something.  I was enjoying some early 90's pop/hip-hop this weekend and was noting how many times these groups give themselves shout outs in the middle of a song.  It was cool back then!

Well, shout outs are back in my life, whether I like it or not.  They first re-emerged on Friday during a step aerobics class at the gym.  I decided to start trying out the morning class at the gym because by evening, I've often lost motivation. So, I went into this step class, and when the instructor asked my name, I didn't think anything about sharing it with her.  Well, about one minute later, I heard the instructor--above the loud pulsing pop music--scream my name through her headset.  "Sarah, you got it!  Everyone, look at Sarah, this is her first class, can you believe it?"  WHAT?!  I mean, I didn't know what to do except to keep doing basic right.

That was only the beginning.  The steps got harder, and I couldn't keep up.  But I got some encouragement on the mic: "Sarah, don't worry, hun, you'll get it".  OH GOD, PLEASE MAKE IT STOP is all I could keep thinking!  It was so mortifying.  Why wasn't she rallying any of the regulars?!  This went on until the end, when she actually made people give me a round of applause for making it through the class.

Now, you can imagine, any workout class that happens at 8:30 in the morning is going to be mostly filled with a certain...shall we way "more mature" group of folks.  But the thing is, the morning class is really good because it's hard enough and early enough that I enjoy it and don't have time to think about skipping out on it.  And it's about 50/50 older folks and folks my age.  So, I showed up again today.  This time I only got about 5 shout outs, which was a BIG improvement over Friday.  I'm hopeful that I can start flying under the radar by the end of the week.

I should have known that the shout outs were infecting me, but I didn't realize it until today when I blurted out in my teaching section "let's give some shout outs to the parts of this text that were real stumpers".....  I mean, The Grandissimes is a tough text to read, even for senior Literature majors.  It seemed like a good idea.

Yeah, "sun of my life" immediately informed me that shout outs are very "high school" and basically a terrible idea in a senior-level discussion section.  But, seriously, it finally got the students talking about a very difficult text to talk about!  The Grandissimes is in patois, refers to parts of history that these students are really unfamiliar with, AND it is not a linear narrative, nor does it have a singular narrative.  So...I had to get them talking somehow.  I got about half of the class engaged in discussion on the first day, so even though I'm feeling kind of lame right now, I'm thinking that perhaps I can count this as a success.

Here's Snoop Dogg giving shout outs to British Royalty...and he is still way cooler than me:

Getting out of the house...

We have been spending lots of time at home, and I've been spending lots of time at school, so we decided to get out for a bit this weekend.  Not knowing people has made it a bit tough to have a social life, but we are working on it.  Through mutual friends in San Francisco, we recently met a couple who just moved to Monterey from Brooklyn, so we gave them a call and the four of us decided to explore Monterey together today.  It was so much fun!

The drive there is really nice along CA-1 -- just under an hour -- and it passes through a heavy agricultural area, so even though we had already visited the Farmer's Market this morning, we stopped off at a farm and got more tomatoes, garlic and persimmons on the way.  Cannery Row was our first stop, and we basically walked with tunnel vision through this highly touristed area.  We ended up down at San Carlos Beach, which is a popular beach for scuba certifications, and it was pretty cool to see so many people out there training.

After a lovely lunch outdoors at a BBQ joint on the lighthouse avenue strip, we headed out to Pebble Beach/17 Mile Drive.  There were tons of surfers and tons of kelp/seaweed as well!  Someone was actually surfing with a paddle (paddleboarding-surfing?), which inspired me to want to find a wetsuit and take paddleboarding lessons; it looked like so much fun!  Continuing our way along 17 mile drive we also saw an enormous colony of sea lions out on this rock (pictured).  It's hard to make them out in this picture, but you can make out the shapes of their heads looking up from the top of the rock...and basically, most of the brown (yeah, a huge area) part of the rock is made up of hundreds of sea lions lying on top of one another:

I have never seen so much kelp either!  I'm pretty sure that Monterey Bay is home to a kelp forest, and this is some of the thick rope-like kelp along the shore.  Apparently kelp in this area can grow 10 to 12 inches per day and can get to be as tall as 175 feet...

The Lone Cypress Tree was an interesting sight as well.  It is the icon of Pebble Beach and is 250 years old.  It is pretty cool as it looks like it is emerging from rock:

California is a beautiful place and what made today even better than just enjoying more of our beautiful new home state was enjoying it with new friends as well!

Time Management

The minute the very idea of time management is mentioned, I can't help but jump to conclusions about the disciplinary and hegemonic nature of time management per Michel Foucault.  In Discipline and Punish, Foucault talks about the timetable as operating under a "principle of non-idleness" that originated in monasteries explaining that "it was forbidden to waste time, which was counted by God and paid for by man, the timetable was to eliminate the danger of wasting it--a moral offense and economic dishonesty"(154, Discipline & Punish).  Nowadays the timetable has become so ingrained in our western existence that we have sayings like "time is money," and worse, we internalize this principle to such an extent that one often feels compelled to call him/herself lazy when indulging in extended periods of non-productive time, i.e. idleness.

I am a good case study for some student in psychology or sociology because I find our contemporary relationship with time to be highly dysfunctional and problematic.  And yet, I have to admit that I am one of the strictest adherents to this philosophy.  I am currently in an interesting position because I am craving more structure and even created a timetable for myself this week...and yet, my new lifestyle is kind of rejecting the timetable at every point.  I wondered where our TA timecards are to ensure that I work my 20 hours a week...and of course, I figured out quickly that there are no timecards.  No one cares how much time I actually work or when or where I do it.  This is a kind of freedom I have really never known.  

If you look online for a book that tells you how to reject time management, you will be hard pressed to find one.  I did about five minutes worth of research to find that there is nothing so far that I can tell that is written explicitly on that topic (note: this research was purely for the blog entry and not for self help).  If you are looking for books to help you resist the compelling power to organize your time, you will simply find books that identify this resistance as a disorder and proceed to tell you how to manage your time.  A search on time management on Amazon.com yielded 142,880 results.  The best selling book about time management appears to be, "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity".  It seems to me that any book that is focused on undoing the notion of time being intimately related with productivity would still have to have a relatively productive title that suggests more productive creativity or something like that.

Do you think that at some point people will start resisting this compulsion to spend their time in "non-idleness"?  Like, what if there was one day a year that people around the world went to work and did nothing in solidarity and the people who do not have work sat in front of city hall or something to show that they are resisting the compulsion to either be productive or be invisible.  I mean, I guess the idea of a sit-in is akin to this, but sit-ins are typically related to a specific workforce in a specific place.  I'm thinking like something on an international scale like Earth Day, International Women's Day or International Day of Peace.  The call to action could be something like: time-oppressed people of the world unite!  It's not quite as slogan-y as "workers of the world, unite"...but it is also perhaps less identifiable with a specific political party.  I mean, lots of CEO's are time-oppressed and this could give them an opportunity to join in on the fun too.  I'm just saying...it seems like an interesting idea.

Filles à la cassette

I'm reading George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes for the first time and am just a few chapters into it.  Already, I've been surprised by a few things that are more unfamiliar to me than I expected, like the term "fille à la cassette," since it is used in the book as if it was a well-known and widely used term in 19th century Louisiana.  I've never heard of it before now!

A "fille à la cassette" is a woman who was brought to Louisiana from France strictly for the purpose of marriage because there were many creole and cajun men who were running after women of color even though interracial marriage was illegal.  Apparently, these "filles à la cassette" were originally taken from off of the streets of Paris, brothels, etc...and although history is certainly vague on the point (as it so often is), I suspect that these women were not so much invited to Louisiana as they were forced to go.  At any rate, it seems that many young women were also taken from Catholic convents as well.  Aha, Bingo!  Trés interessante!  

What makes this a fascinating point to me is that I never did quite understand the enormous Ursuline presence in New Orleans.  Now it is all coming together.  A few weeks ago in the French course while we were talking about Moliére's play, Les Précieuses ridicules, the professor was explaining that in the late 16th century a widespread phenomenon of conspicuous consumption was beginning to be a problem (and lasted for a long time) among the French nobility, which led to an increase in significant indebtedness.  Exacerbating the issue of diminishing wealth was the fact that families with female heirs of marrying age were at risk of causing the family to fall further into debt because of the large amount of money and pieces of property required for their dowries.  What was a wealthy nobleman to do?!  

Enter the Catholic order of the Ursulines, whose convents were no longer just safe havens for orphaned and poor girls.  These convents also became safe havens for indebted nobility to preserve their fortunes as families of the nobility started sending their adolescent daughters into Ursuline convents--ultimately forcing them to take religious vows and preventing them from getting married--so that the family could maintain their property and manage their debts.  The amount that one paid to the convent was significantly less than one would pay in a dowry.

This form of forced imprisonment led to all sorts of mayhem in the convents as women were confined there (who most certainly did not have a vocational calling or will to become a religious), including rampant supposed episodes of demon possession.  Focusing back on Louisiana, this trend of circulating young women in and out of the marriage market at the will of men in power was something that extended to the colonies, and the Ursuline order was at the center of it.  They were one of the biggest sources of "filles à la cassette" in Louisiana and a much more efficient pipeline than plucking women from the streets of Paris.  It's a fascinating history of women's history that I definitely did not learn about in 8th grade Louisiana history.  

So, now I must decide whether this is a topic that I might introduce in my discussion section or if this is a bit too tangential and far outside of the scope of the discussion?  Maybe I will keep it as my "get out of silence" card if discussion on The Grandissimes isn't happening as readily as it should.  

Getting Oriented

Today was a super exciting day: orientation for the PhD program and presentation of classes for the year.  I began the day at 10 AM (I do like academic life so far in that nothing seems to begin before 10 AM) by meeting the professor who I will be TA'ing for this quarter.  She immediately expressed her enthusiasm by calling my name from down the hall upon her arrival, "Sarah?  I'm so excited to meet you!".  I was caught off guard because I was so excited to meet her!

From there, we talked about George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes which is the first work on the syllabus.  I told her that I considered doing my master's thesis on Cable (he is a Louisiana writer), but decided on Octavia Butler...and quickly qualified that by stating how I know that to most people these authors seem completely unrelated.  Her reply?  "Oh yeah, I can see how you could be thinking about them in the same area of study".   All day this kind of excitement of ideas and encouragement was present!  I cannot overstate how awesome it is for a professor to acknowledge and express enthusiasm in your way of thinking; it is critical to being a successful student!

We also had our first pedagogy course today, which will be a weekly meeting with all of the first year TA's where we discuss how we are conducting our sections, etc.  I'm pretty excited about leading my first discussion session on Monday.  I have about 33 students and most of them are seniors with a few juniors and sophomores as well.  My plan for the first week is to get students to introduce themselves and learn about their interest in this course, which is called "The Historical Imaginary," since it isn't a required course.  

After the pedagogy course, I listened to the presentations of the classes for the next year and had a really hard time trying to figure out what I want to take this year because there are so many things that interest me!  After spending some time thinking about it tonight, I think I will be taking a seminar on W.E.B. DuBois called "DuBois in a Global Context".  I figure it is a good course for me to start with (in addition to the required theory-heavy Proseminar and the Pedagogy courses) since it will focus on considering DuBois as the first critical race theorist.  I've never taken a course specifically on critical race theory even though I have been working with many texts in that genre for a while.  I figure this is a good, solid foundation for situating myself within the genre.

Now, my task at hand is preparing the necessary work for the Proseminar on Tuesday which includes a polished 25 page paper and several readings from Marx, Luce Irigaray, Rod Ferguson and Walter Benjamin.  Apparently reading Mimesis was just required as a backdrop to what we will be talking about...which is good because even though it feels like I read that enormous book for nothing, I'm really glad we won't be focusing on that text for an entire class session.  At the end of the book, the author was analyzing Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse and actually kept referring to the author as "he"!  I mean, I know the dude was writing in the 1950's...but are you kidding me?!  How patriarchal.

As of today, I am feeling super excited about learning, engaging with students, teaching, etc.; the whole spectrum of responsibilities is extremely motivating!