This is a blog about what it’s like to be an English professor and to be a member of the Rockhurst community, which is to say that it's a blog about things that are awesome.
As part of an ongoing effort to stay at least in sight of the curve when it comes to social media, I've been tinkering with "xtranormal"(new-ish, free-ish filmmaking software). I made this movie:
My idea is to show it to the students in my Studies in the American Novel course as an example of a way to demonstrate a strategy of novel writing--a task I'll be asking my students to do.
I'll probably tell my students that this 1-minute movie took me 5 minutes to make and I won't exactly be lying. But I also won't be saying how I spent an afternoon (on an unseasonably sunny day) tinkering with the many, hilarious gesture and facial-expression options on xtranormal.
The script was easy to write. The voice, also an easy decision. We all know, even Oprah, how instructive a proper British sensibility can be. The camera angles were easy, too. I produced the shot, reverse-shot effect fairly easily. But the "expressions" and "look-ats" took forever.
There was something about watching this bald, digital British man try on such faces as "mild disappointment" and "you bet!" that was totally engrossing.
It got me thinking about what Lawrence Weschler calls the "uncanny valley," the frightening, fascinating state of being into which we viewers of fake faces sometimes fall.
One of the ironies of the Christmas shopping season is that I buy more stuff for me than I do at any other time of the year. While shopping for books, say, about geology for my rock-obsessed nephew, I start wondering what happened to that copy of Loren Eisley’s Immense Journey that I read during that camping trip to the Loess Hills in 1999. Hey look, Amazon’s got a copy for $8.80. That brings my cart total over $25. Free shipping! Proceed to Checkout. Click.
(BTW, look for a future post about how I never shop at real bookstores anymore and how that makes Richard Russo mad and Farhad Manjoo happy.)
When I’m not teaching, I read a decent amount. But I’m not afraid (and only slightly ashamed) to say that I probably buy more books than I read.
Here are the books I bought last month:
Russell Banks's Lost Memory of Skin
Teju Cole's Open City
Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding
Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds
Maxine Hong Kingston's I Love a Broad Margin to My Life
Here are the books I read last month:
Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding
John Mullan’s How Novels Work
Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo
Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence
James Wood’s How Fiction Works
The first list contains only titles that I am dying to read, or, in the case of On Native Grounds, dying to reread. The second list, with the exception of Harbach’s novel, contains only titles that I’ve already read, titles that I’m teaching this semester and that need to be reread so that I can gear up.
Here’s a third list. Books I wanted to read over break:
I read 3 of 8. That’s not a bad batting average (.375). If I were a pro ballplayer, I’d be asking for a raise. So why do I feel like a failure? I think it has something to do with the fact that I’m a caught in a list loop.
Check out my Amazon wishlists:
"Adaptations" = novels/plays/stories that have been made into movies that I like;
"Adaptations 2" = movies adapted from novels/plays/stories that I like;
"Beats" = books about the countercultural literary movement of the same name;
"Depression" = books about America during the 1930s;
"Nuclear" = novels that have something to do with nuclear bomb testing (a pet interest that lasted a weekend but that I can’t let go of);
"Wishlist" = the 228 things that I want and that don’t fit any of the other categories.
Then there’s my Safari "Reading List":
To say nothing of my my home office window-well, which is my on-deck spot for books-that-I-absolutely-must-read-if-I-plan-to-continue-to-call-myself-a-scholar-of-American-fiction, or my 300+ Netflix cue.
But you get the picture. I'm list-obsessed, which I think makes me totally normal. If this kind of manicuring of the digital ways of organizing the free time we don't have because we're busy managing our digital ways of organizing weren't so common, then this sketch wouldn't be so obviously, painfully funny:
So, my New Year’s Resolution (I actually have a list of twelve): Be less normal.
The best thing about Mexico City this year was the Nativity scenes. The big difference between the scenes I saw there and the ones I grew up seeing in the Midwest is the maverick disregard of scale and continuity:
Check out that huge Mary and Joseph and those tiny Magi. It seems wrong to put such care into the setting (check out the path of the Magi and the bushes and the trees) and so little care into the relational scale of the characters.
My wife, who's smarter than me, likened this phenomenon to the parable of the leopards in the temple--wherein a pack of wild leopards so regularly stormed a temple in the midst of a ceremony that the temple people decided to make the leopard storming part of the ceremony. In the process, a thing that should be considered a violation of the ceremony (i.e., leopards breaking into a temple or Nativity figures that don't match) becomes part of the ceremony. The parable is Kafka's and therefore it's anyone's guess what it means. Morris Dickstein, possibly my favorite literary critic, used the parable as the title of a book about the way "outsiders" have become central to American fiction writing.
As I see it, two things happen when we make leopards part of our ceremonies: (1) we make the ceremonies more responsive to the way things really are and (2) we make the leopards less of a threat to the sanctity of the ceremonies.
The bold scale discontinuity that I admired in Mexico City Nativity scenes probably started out as a violation of Nativity-scene construction, something that made the scenes seem obviously "wrong." But this discontinuity gradually became a distinguishing feature of Nativity scenes in Mexico City, and I dare say that it's now their raison d'être. Indeed, it's made Nativity scene viewing quite the spectator sport:
And, it's introduced into the otherwise exclusive world of nativity scene figurines such priceless and diverse characters as these:
lounging desert shepherd! and (my new favorite) disappointed Satan!:
