Look with your eyes, not with your hands.


Such a minute fraction of this life do we live: so much is sleep, tooth-brushing, waiting for mail, for metamorphosis, for those sudden moments of incandescence: unexpected, but once one knows them, one can live life in the light of their past and the hope of their future.



A grad student muses on her life, film, friends, politics, reality televizzle, and music.

 
Autumnal Air

Staying up last night to watch Sherman's March and getting up early to prep my lecture for today is taking its toll. It's cold out and I spent the afternoon watching British documentaries about different service industries in the 1930s. It's been a cold day and all day I was on the verge of napping and wanting to nap, but now that it's approaching 10pm, the nap window is eclipsing and the thought of going to bed early occurs to me. I was completely charmed by Sherman's March - a story about a filmmaker who takes his documentary grant money to make a film recreating Sherman's march through the South. Along the way, he is completely sidetracked and infatuated with meeting women and having this temporary relationships. Unfortunately, my video store only had a VHS copy (there might not be a better non-VHS print available) but despite the gritty, dark, and blurry format, it's a great film with great commentary. I still don't know where I would take this film, in a scholarly direction, I am glad to have seen it and will probably be hung up on infusing personal narrative into other (academic) pursuits for a while to come.

Back to reading underneath the covers - but the book I am reading actually ties into some of the issues that I've thought about and perhaps commented about in this blog. The book takes up casual, everyday conversations and tries to work out how these "stories" align with traditional narrative theory. In narrative theory, stories have clear structure, temporal or chronological ordering and always seem to resolve themselves. Conversation seems marked by un-resolved issues - and the authors even posit that speech allows us to work out particularly ambiguous and tentative experiences and try to understand them through language. Our conversational partners can shift and direct conversations achieving the status of almost a second author. As I work out the details, they'll likely find their way into this forum -- a quasi-journalistic, personal diary, rant, stream-of-consciousness, written accord.
posted by lmjasinski at 9:45 PM