That’s today, according to the Catholic Church.  I was at one of those (churches) today — Holy Family — in Palatine, Illinois (home of the Lucite Yanni Christ, who invites you up to the party in the cross).  I often end up at Holy Family when I’m in the suburbs, and I think I’ve mentioned it here before.

Anyway, we were there today because my Grandmother was one of the Mass’s special intentions, as one of those who’ve recently passed from this life.  We had a memorial service for her on Friday, buried her on Saturday, and this morning went to the 11:00 mass.  We then had breakfast, and then trimmed the trees (an event that featured me 30 feet up our monster silver maple, with an extension cord, a reciprocating saw, and giant tree limbs tied with ropes swinging and crashing around randomly as they became disconnected from the tree).  We then dropped my brother at the airport, caught “War of the Worlds” and finally the Palatine fireworks.  It’s been a long day and weekend. 

It’s been very good to see my extended family again.  My family are not prolific breeders, but we seem able to assemble second and third cousins at various removes reliably enough to pull off large family gatherings, such as happened this weekend at my parent’s place here in Palatine.  Which is a testament to my grandmother, now gone. 

While my mom’s mother, Violet (who is also, absolutely, the greatest), can have a kind of sharp edge, and embodies a Germanic post-Great-Depression approach to life, my Father’s mother — Lorraine — was protected from hardship early-on by her father’s position as a railroad executive.  Her view of things was always, as far as I’ve been able to tell, sunny.  Happy.  She loved being with people, and chatting, and parties, and things like that.  Bringing people together, and making sure everyone was having a good time.  While Violet and her husband scrimped and invested carefully, Lorraine felt that money was for spending, and for helping to having fun, with the people she loved.

I spent Thursday night reading old letters and yearbooks.  Looking at pictures of my grandmother as an infant, an and young girl, and then a high school student (did you know that high-schoolers in the 30’s all wrote little *poems* in each-other’s yearbooks?).  Then Friday, I went to the memorial service, which was very good.  No coffin, or urn or anything like that on display.  Only photos–mostly the ones from my Grandmother’s own walls, containing pictures of those in attendance, more than of my grandmother.  And pictures of her, too, most them ones I’d never seen before.  My Dad had asked the presiding Catholic Deacon (who seemed a good and capable fellow) to encourage everyone in the audience to come up and say a few words.  “Very Quaker,” as one of my friends noted (the Deacon seemed to like and find novel the idea).  My dad spoke, then my cousin, my dad’s sister, my mother, my aunt, and then me.  While my words seem small, when set beside those of my cousin Irene (who was especially close to my grandmother, and who was with her when she died) I’m very glad I got up and said some things.

I’m having trouble bring this message to an end.  Sentimentality creeps in–and it becomes impossible to put things accurately. 

So let’s then cut this short.  And I think I’ll turn-off comments on this message, too.  I’ve had a great weekend visiting my cousins, and remembering my grandmother, who had been (in truth) leaving us for the last four or five years.  I hope everyone had a pleasant July 3rd, and a fine Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time.

Reckless, I’ll perhaps risk spending a few precious minutes on a third final post.  I should be whipping up a paper proposal for a conference that had a submission deadline a week ago.  But I was busy getting my throat stretched-out and (I swear!) thereby messing with my damn chackras, so I forgot about it.  They tell me that I shouldn’t get my hopes up since there are surplus proposals, but that they’ll take a look if I send them out something.  So I’ll try and send them something superfantastic later in the evening, or perhaps tomorrow a.m..  I’m also supposed to be getting something together for a local teaching conference, and putting together a talk for the local early modern reading group (which will be a preview for the Waterloo paper).  Both these early modern papers are from the chapter that I’m now working on, and should lead to a publishable article, I think.  So I need to be working. 

One thing I *shouldn’t * have been working on was a course proposal for a 106 (a lit. course on a non-standard topic) for next semester.  This semester, for the first time, adjuncts aren’t being considered for these positions, apparently, although there was no announcement made to this effect.  I suppose one should never be surprised at the way adjuncts get treated in academe.  When recently a job candidate who writes extensively about contingent labor in the academy was brought to campus and wined and dined, the adjuncts who are the subject of much of her writing were literally not on the agenda–she may not even have known that the department employs them.

The idea then for me I guess is to hit escape velocity and push on outta this gravity-well, and  sigh somewhere else at the plight of the adjuncts beneath me.  Or market myself for a year or two before going to do something different and at least marginally or potentially more profitable.   

Oddly, in any case, what I most want I think is to finish my dissertation, which is part of a long tradition of odd documents that obviously work out concerns that gave their authors prolonged trouble.  You can find the prologue to my dissertation in old copies of my high school’s literary magazine.  To be quite honest, its completion (should such occur) will be a remarkable surprise, even given the obvious difference in length and erudition between my slim volume and Burton’s grand, humane opus.  I sometimes think that Burton’s tragic opposite, with his slim, presupposing, and confused The Nature of Truth is perhaps the better analogue for what I’ve been (occasionally) writing for these past few years.  But still, in The Nature of Truth, the young Baron Brooke seems to more-or-less to have had his say — a rare and precious thing.

Brooke (son of the troubled poet-courtier Fulke Greville, who’s castle and famous ghost are now  the property of Madame Tussaud’s) probably didn’t have time to recall his good fortune when, on the way to cleanse Litchfield Cathedral of its Popish idols, the universal sniper caught him through the eye.  So maybe he wasn’t go glad then that he’d written The Nature of Truth.  And maybe he’s not so glad now to have written it.  But at the same time, he would be.  Which counts, somehow.

So, light posting this week, I think.  The campus has emptied-out for thanksgiving break, and I’ve been taking these first few days to sneak in a little work on my own dissertation, although probably beginning today I’ll also need to get going on my teaching work for next week.  I’ve to return a huge stack of papers right after break.

Since I’ve been mostly just working the last few days, fixing up this (horrible) chapter to give it to my adviser, there’s not much interesting social news to report.  In fact I’ve been kind of enjoying a little quiet isolation.

There is however one piece of not so very great news: the car is, apparently, dead.

Ok, not dead so much as ‘irreparable,’ which is almost as bad.  Apparently my beloved red hatchback is burning oil and has bad compression in a cylinder or two, and can’t be fixed short of an engine overhaul or replacement for  $2000+ (more than the value of the car).

But the good news is that, actually, the car still works.  The engine likes to stall when it’s cold (it’s easy to restart when this happens), and now it likes also to stall when it’s really hot (and when this happens you need to wait a few minutes or sometimes an hour or more to start it again).  So it still seems to work for short trips, sort of.  Especially if you drive the speed limit, keep the heater on, and don’t accelerate too hard.  The most delicate sort of freedom!

So, until the thing falls apart completely, it may still be serviceable for picking up groceries and such.  For cheap thrills it’s possible to drive up to North Prospect (where I picked up the new tmbg and Brian Wilson’s _Smile_ last night), and contemplate the possibility of stalling out on the overpass above I-74. which I always imagine would be so very much fun.

Anyway, so I’ve been thinking about whether I could do without a car, if/when it might be necessary to do so.  Probably the answer is yes.  As long as my landlord lets me stick a washer/dryer in the basement, the only need for a car would be to pick-up groceries.  Schnuck’s and County Market are only about a 20 minute walk away, however.  Not so bad really.  Jerry’s IGA promises to deliver groceries (but only to the “house-bound”?) for an $8 delivery fee. 

And I noticed too that the Prarieland Community Supported Agriculture collective distributes shares of groceries just a block or so away from my house.  I’m always sort of fascinated by the prospect of buying a share of  produce from the organic farm that grows stuff for the PCSA.  The idea is that I’d give them $405 for my 33 week share, and then each week I could pick-up my portion of groceries, fresh from the farm, and just down the street.  The food you get depends on what’s in season.  A week of August produce would look like this, while one from October might look like this.  These look pretty good, don’t you think? 

On the other hand, it’s not quite cheap, and I should perhaps be realistic about my ability and willingness to consistently cook up and use all this interesting produce.  I can see myself ordering all this and then still surviving on delivery or bar food, which would not be good.

Further assisting carless survival might be the new downtown bakery slated to open soon.  This will hopefully be an improvement over the weird Persimmon grocery, where I swear they will try to make you pay eight dollars (or, ok $7.50+tax) for a loaf of bread.

I’ve had perhaps just a little too much fun this weekend.  Out and about at the Esquire Friday night, and then spent yesterday grading with sarah in the afternoon, then viewing _The Grudge_ with Dana and Christina, finally kicking back at Sanjay’s birthday/Diwali party, before being carted home once again by the kindly rachel s.  But ok, about the movie…

The Grudge, I’ve decided is recommendable.  Takishi Shimizu directs this Americanized remake of his own Ju-On (which I missed when it was briefly at the New Art a few weeks ago).
Critical opinion on the film  is interestingly divided, and if you decide to see it, you might well decide that there’s not much there but a lot of Boo!-saying.  But I think I’d disagree.

As we left the film Dana asked why it was set in Japan, to which I lamely asked: “Well, why it shouldn’t it have been?”  And as we drove home, we mostly discussed various plot issues, and I found myself sort of defending the film from Christina’s questions about its plot.  My line was that the nature and capabilities of the Grudge couldn’t/shouldn’t have been spelled-out too specifically.

The film thematizes unintelligibility, which is one reason it’s interesting that this remake focuses on Americans in Japan.  As I watched the film, I kept being remained of the excellent _Lost in Translation_, where a kind of pleasure in keeping a kind of loose grasp on things and ideas and people is described.  But _The Grudge_ find  in such looseness a kind of helplessness in the face of people and realities that threaten to grasp one with a kind of deadly fixity.  Sexual obsession, childlike neediness, obsessional rage, and finally death here countervail the pleasurable dream-state of LIT.  (jeeze does Ebert miss the point on this one).

The film plays with this, as the Americans repeatedly struggle to communicate with people around them, or simply to obtain food or move about the city.  This gets racialized when a hapless white American professor doesn’t notice he’s being stalked by a person whom he fails to recognize among in sea of Asians who to him are apparently as indistinguishable as they are “inscrutable.”

Like LIT then, The Grudge is always in danger of slipping into essentialized or even racist descriptions.  When Detective Nakagawa tells S. Michelle Gellar about Japanese beliefs about the dead, the film veers close to an easy kind of exoticism, which also appears early in the film when Gellar’s character peers over a wall into a Shinto cemetery to watch the natives burn incense to help keep in touch w/their ancestors.

The Grudge seemed a little flat to me at first, but is better on reflection.  I like how cramped and compact the evil house is — how you can never even see the house a whole.  And how the wide modern spaces of the City contrast with the convoluted neighborhood.  How the evil ghosts are so pointedly figures of the bitterly powerless.  The surly child or sullen girl, who’s look expresses a desire to devour and destroy that can be ignored only on  the assumption of this person’s powerlessness.  Of the wife, son, and dad who die in the house to inaugurate its evil ways, only the wife and son come back as grudgers.  Their scariness depends on their hostile helplessness.  The dynamic is familiar. 

Which brings us back maybe to the question of racial and cultural suspicion, which always lingers in this film (when first trying to find the evil house, Gellar approaches a Japanese mother and her child.  The mother politely answer’s G.’s question, but gently pulls her kid away from Gellar when G tries to be friendly).  In this context of hostility and and incomensurability, it’s hard not to read the film’s abiding preoccupation with eye-shape in terms that are at least partly racial. 

At the moment before the Grudge ghosts kill, and at other more random intervals, the eyes of the ghost become suddenly preternaturally wide.  This is automatically scary.  Normally one’s eyes narrow before attacking someone, and the reverse is horrifying in a Bataille kind of obscene way, race or no race.  But here eye shape is racialized, too.  Like anime-style animation, that draws figures in a way influenced by American post WWII cartoons, and that produces characters with weird more Caucasian-than-Caucasian eye-shapes, the Grudge presents its white victims with a last vision of a face that like Anime after WWII, offers back a spectacle of weird reflected whiteness to those it’s about to consume. 

So this then, is my answer to Dana about _The Grudge_ being set in Japan.

[p.s. reminds me of the BBC news report I heard a few days ago about Japanese nationalism.  The BBC announcer actually referred to the post-WWII provision in the Japanese constitution prohibiting a standing army as an act of “castration.”]

So it looks like the new One Main building in Downtown Champaign will soon house some neat stuff.  There are ambitious plans for Downtown Urbana, too; which could certainly use a little livening up.  Because sometimes that lonely Bierkenstock store just isn’t enough…

On Friday, I was tired.  I wrapped-up my office hours, and took a slow walk to the bus stop, over at Green and Wright.  It sunny and brisk and a very fine day.

I arrived at the bus stop, and stood near one of the concrete benches, looking down Green Street, to seen whether any useful bus might soon be arriving.  Seeing none, I resolved to sit down, chill out, and wait.  This plan was interrupted however, by a gigantic mantid.

Ok, not gigantic, perhaps.  But good-sized, anyhow.  On the shaded concrete block of a bench that was immediately beside me was a white semi-opaque plastic cup.  Large—the kind you might find at a party—well-suited for rum and coke.  The cup was on the bench, weighed down by about an inch or so of water remaining inside it.  Balanced absurdly on the lip of the cup was a large brown praying mantis!

Moreover, it was not just balancing there.  Its little triangular head was pivoting about, and its arms were moving.  Its whole body was swaying back and forth in a manner entirely weird and disturbing–something I hadn’t know was a regular feature of mantis behavior (.  Mantises, it seems, possess an unusual adaptive camouflage, in their habit of swaying weirdly back and forth to simulate the motion of some non-sentient foliage, swaying in the breeze.  They are able to approach prey by using an imaginary wind.

Anyway, on the plastic cup it didn’t look too convincing, I’m afraid.  And you could walk around the mantis, causing it to turn and follow you, waving and undulating back and forth.

Now, I don’t know what others might have thought, but to me this was way cool.  I checked-out the mantis for a little while, and then thought to look around for anyone I knew who might like to take a look at this odd and yet kind of menacing dancing bug.  Usually at Wright and Green around that time you can find a person or two from the department or whatever, waiting to head  home.  But no luck.  No one I knew was visible near the Busy Green/Wright intersection, either.

However, a woman had just sat down at the other end of the bench.  With no one else to show the mantis to, and after just a moment of hesitation, I said something like, “Hey, did you check out this preying mantis?”

She may have muttered something like “oh wow” before getting back to her book.  And I decided against asking whether she had noted the mantis’s dance, though I was sure she hadn’t.  For the next few minutes she, the dancing mantis and I waited in silence for the bus. 

I suppose that this women probably just wasn’t too interested in bugs.  But also, and given that, she probably figured I was either out of my mind, or some guy mostly interested to begin a seductive-type conversation with her.  Which really, I wasn’t.  But then it struck me how cool it would be if this were my seduction technique.  When my bus arrived before hers, I thought of how neat it would be to pick up the cup and the mantis, and stick each of them in a pocket, before shooting her a disgruntled look.  Just to confirm and elaborate on her suspicion.  That maybe I am a guy with a dancing mantis and a cup, who places the cup in public spaces so that he can strike up conversations with any unwary lovelies who happen by.

Surely this would be the ultimate in pick-up techniques!  Forget the whole puppy thing.  All I’d need is a little dancing mantis, a plastic cup, and a lid with some holes poked in it.  Who could possibly resist?

[apologies of course to David Rees]

So, I live in a house built perhaps around 1930.  It’s two stories tall, capped by an attic, and mounted on a very unfinished basement.  It’s covered in some not-very-pleasing yellowish aluminum siding, and set on one of the busier streets in this medium-sized town here in Central Illinois.  The house sits on a somewhat barren lot, that contains three trees and a large gravel driveway or parking lot. 

Functional but unbeautiful, this is clearly a rental property.  The house is subdivided into an upper and lower apartment.  I occupy the somewhat larger lower level, which is a space that includes some some well-preserved hardwood floors, a fireplace, and seventeen windows.  It also contains some horrible linoleum, some tacky wood paneling, and some horrid acoustic tiles on the ceiling.  It’s an interesting old building that’s been sadly ignored, as layers of ugly, utilitarian, and amateur coatings and coverings have slowly swallowed up what was once a decent and well-assembled little home.

Which brings me then to Harvey.  He’s the landlord.  And he scrupulously maintains the place.  So scrupulous is he in fact, that almost every day he is to be found wandering around the outside of the apartment, doing maintenance of an indeterminate kind.    He’s picking up twigs from the messy Sycamore tree.  He’s poking at the gutters.  He’s watering the nasty chive-type plant.  He’s doing I don’t usually know quite what.  But he’s there. 

I woke up the other day (the international day of the Other) around 8 or so, to find Harvey (not unusually)  standing squarely in front of my North window, watering something.  I sat at my desk, in the south bay window, and perhaps 10 minutes later he was standing right outside that one jiggling a gutter.  He remained there for several minutes before again disappearing.  Then he was in the basement, where you could hear him moving things about.  Now, I’m not sure why, but somehow Harvey’s random circling around my apartment was beginning to freak me out.  I decided to leave the apartment, perhaps to get a taco.

When I opened the door from my apartment into the front hallway, there was Harvey.  Harvey was perched on the stairs that ascend to the second floor apartment, leaning out from them to change a hallway lightbulb that I’m quite sure hadn’t burnt out (I discovered later that he’d installed an incandescent lightbulb of a strange greenish yellow color) .  I said hello to harvey and ducked under him and headed to my car.  I noticed as I turned the key in the ignition that one of those fat brown web-weaving spiders had built an enormous web across the passenger seat and now appeared to be hovering next to my head.

Ok, so the spider is not harvey’s fault.  And one cannot dislike him (Harvey that is) too much—two years ago he had a heart-attack raking leaves on my front lawn (I was gone, and he called for help on his cellphone).  For a while after, his kids would come over and rake leaves.  And I offered to help a few times.  But he continues to appear most days, performing random and often unnecessary maintenance tasks.  And though his terrible repairs are slowing encrusting the property with ugliness, his compulsive conscientiousness is I guess preferable to the hostile neglect practiced by most landlords.   

Yet the persistent popping up of Harvey in front of this or that window is beginning to get a little disconcerting.  And his recent desire to install a plastic shower stall in my bathroom, covering up a window does not meet with my approval, any more than his green-yellow hall light, or the taupe-colored faux wood paneling that cover the walls of the kitchen.  The project of finishing my dissertation, finding gainful employment, and acquiring a place of my own is looking better and better all the time.

Other news includes:

Yesterday: tried some delicious fried Mandoo w/April at that one Korean place on campus.  More experiments in Korean food to come, I think.

Also yesterday: had some fantastic office hour conversations with three very sharp students.  Two of these concerned Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited”–a subtle sad story that contains a number of details that I missed on first reading it.  These conversations  reminded me why it is occasionally possible to really love teaching.

A fine weekend, including a couple of lovely get-togethers, courtesy of the English and Philosophy departments.  Just what I needed, really.  A succession of short standing-up conversations that were almost but not exactly meaningless.  The philosophy party inexplicably had a dj, but no one danced till he left and somebody plugged her ipod into the system.  It was the kind of slightly reckless late night house party that perhaps tends to vanish from one’s life in one’s thirties, if not earlier.  Giant perfectly white waste treatment tanks loomed from across a field that faced the house.  Little chairs were in the house’s driveway.  Pinkish floodlights  gave the tanks an alien glow,  keeping them safe from vandals and rascals.  One must suppose these tanks were filled with excrement, but that was ok, and it was good that they were there.

Hmm.  All this portentous mystery this may be a clue that I’ve been teaching _Heart of Darkness_ in my fiction class.  Not having read the text in a number of years I was stunned and kind of taken aback by the nastiness of Conrad’s description of Africans, and I showed up ready to defend myself for having assigned such a thing.  Well, of course there only one person in the class willing to suppose out loud that the novel might possibly be racist in any way.  And generally, the class was bored and annoyed, prompting me to eventually mention a participation problem—a step that is almost always a bad idea.

Reading HOD again, I was struck not just by its racism, but also by what seemed a kind of a basic stupidity in th novel.  I’ve fallen out of sympathy with poor Conrad, I suppose.  I mean, tell me, just how clumsy is this:

[mysterious sage Marlow opines about Colonialism:]  “‘What redeems it is the idea only.  An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; an an unselfish belief in the idea–something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. . .’

He broke off.

Ok.  Hmm.  The white man, worshiping an idol?  The horror!  And in case you don’t get the point of Marlow’s dark insinuation, this idea will be repeated every 5 or 10 pages throughout the rest of the novella.  What drums like church bells, you say!?  Good God, what can you mean, man!?

This annoyance aside, the Africa of C’s novel demands attention—I can’t help thinking about the reports of war and cannibalism from out of northern Congo now.  Despite the rapacious evil of the Colonial project (then, as now), Conrad’s narrator at least cares enough about the Africans he describes to despise them.  The bland indifference to the novel I felt today from my students creeped me out even more than Conrad’s descriptions of devilish cannibals.* 

In Conrad’s hateful descriptions there seems to be something *wrong* at least—with the narrator, with the Company, with the abjection of the Africans, or with God, who must be guilty, either of having produced a lower race, or for allowing a people to be enslaved and debased as a result of historical accident.  Or perhaps God is blamable here only for his absence (in which case we circle back then to Marlow’s Colonial idol).  I dislike in Conrad his iconophobic unwillingness to get beyond exhausted despair at the prospect of even a little idolatry, or to consider carefully what might constitute idolatry.  For Conrad any tolerance of idolatry can lead only to monstrous Kurtzian idols.  Conrad therefore, like Marlow, simply  stops dead at the thought of human-made meaning — a move that forever cuts off African worshipers of strange Gods from Conrad’s human community.

Still, despite his racism, Conrad troubled by problems observes in the Congo, and gets credit for that.  Whereas my students seemed disengaged by the problems of Africa—at least as presented in Conrad’s novel, and perhaps more broadly.  HoD leads readers to attempt to identify the wrongness of events in the Congo–a point at which things seem to become murky, and we are left with one or more overwhelming and necessary question(s).

If the class seems quiet again Wednesday, I will try to bring this a little more fully into view.

Tonight, Sidney perhaps.  Need to wrap up this section posthaste and try try onwards.

[EDIT 9/19:  Raised this all quite pointedly in class on Friday.  The class seemed gradually to awaken to the issues here, or perhaps to notice the presence of issues to which they were already awake in a novel which had not immediately revealed them.  Sadly, class ended just as many students began participating in earnest.  Perhaps it is not too late for the class to achieve a higher level of participation and interest.]