At right -- Vox's formatting blew up my face to alarming size, and I couldn't take it. "Large Bad Picture." Time to upload a new avatar. We live in a mad world, I tell you, for that sentence to have any meaning.
What else? I never thought I would be so afflicted by the long, unannounced New York Review hiatus: it's not like I live or die by John Leonard's effluvium, but the table of contents always matches my state of mind so well. We are screwed— but there are books! The TLS, with its devout, snarky Tory sense of the longue durée, can't measure up.
What else else? I was going to post something gloomy, but instead, at the Berkeley Bowl, this was on sale:
Close-up of that label:
So, to make the long story of the last few weeks short: I turned in all my work, including my thesis, and should be cleared to receive my degree whenever all the paperwork is processed. My incredibly flexible, generous, and supportive thesis committee deserves a big collective gold star for their tolerance of my terrible work habits. There should be more faculty like them everywhere, and more graduate programs like this one— not because they tolerate poor work habits, of course, but because of general flexibility, utility, and humaneness. In certain ways I think the formal master's program, which has been widely abandoned in place of the straight Ph.D.-only track, deserves another look: I have no idea how to make the economics of it work, but it's certainly adequate preparation for teaching comp classes (with the certification courses I didn't take) and/or lower-level literature classes, and a lot of people currently slogging through doctorates are going to get jobs doing just that. If you want to take five years, be poor, go to the MLA, and write a huge M.A. thesis, you certainly can, but you don't have to. (Of course it's easy for me to say, from my lofty perch in the entering class for a reasonably competitive Ph.D. program, that it would be great if more people just got master's degrees, as long as I get the doctorate. That's the way to sell it, by God.) It deserves further thought, that's all.
Anyway: if you haven't hugged someone with a master's degree today, you should. The degree has been shown to make its holders 22.8% calmer and 3% cuter than they were before they got it, correcting for the effects of the maturation process overall.
A love letter from Karoline von Günderrode. Sort of.
Den vorigen Sonntag war ich den ganzen Tag allein zu Hause, abends hatte ich etwas Brustschmerzen, und nicht nur war ich sehr ruhig darüber, ich möchte fast sagen innig froh, ich dachte an alle mich umgebenden drückenden Verhältnisse und da war mir der Gedanke, ihrer vielleicht bald entfesselt zu sein, sehr erwünscht. Zugleich dankte ich dem Schicksal, daß es mich so lange hatte leben leben lassen, um etwas von Schellings göttlicher Philosophie zu begreifen, und was ich noch nicht begriffen, zu ahnen; . . . Auch Deiner gedachte ich . . .
Last Sunday I was home alone the whole day, in the evening I had a pain in my chest, and not only was I quite calm about it, I might almost say inwardly joyful, I thought of all the pressing circumstances that surround me and then the much-desired thought that I might soon be released from them. At the same time I was grateful for the good fortune that I'd been allowed to live long enough to understand something of Schelling's divine philosophy, and to have an idea of what I don't yet understand; . . . I also thought of you . . .
Written 22 March, 1805. I always feel like crap around that time of year too. Maybe I should try Schelling.
Once again. Can any of you name works of fiction, films, real-life stories, etc., in which people take drugs, or other miscellaneous substances, to increase their intelligence? I'm sure this has been done; I just don't know where.
I don't know. What kind of Faustian bargain would you strike to increase your intelligence? Jen mentioned one recently (scroll down to June 14); I don't have a very good sense of how either IQs or asses double in size, so I can't answer. Smart pills that confer frigidity/impotence? How about smart pills that make you an insatiable horndog? That would probably make for better fiction. What if they made you fairly amoral? Or drastically increased your sensitivity to suffering? Or made you really love showtunes?
Ten things that make me preposterously, giddily happy (no books— too many to pick from):
- A certain dirty, fuzzy, supersaturated superloud guitar tone
- The saxophone equivalent—usually at least two at once
- Climbing the pine-studded hills of the American West
- Good espresso (@ Ritual, Bittersweet Rockridge, & a few other spots)
- Jays being jays
- The seashore
- Fast bike rides in no traffic
- Gerhard Richter
- Berlin Berlin Berlin
- Being kissed by this fella
A post brought to you by Listening To The Auteurs Instead of Writing Papers!!!
