Is It Me?

Here's a list of things I've been told in the last two days:

"You got nappy hair!" - my youngest student. She's six and her hair is already broken off from wearing a weave.

"You sound country. Like you from Mississippi." - two of my teenage students, who by the way have not yet mastered subject-verb agreement. And I sound country? Can't a girl say "y'all" without having it come back to haunt her?

"No, my son is not ADHD, he just can't concentrate in class because he has a crush on you." - one of my students' parents. Guess it's time to start playing Mean Teacher if I want to be taken seriously.

"Amanda, what is your ethnicity? I'm only asking because you're so pale." - a woman at my job.

"Do you need a ride home? Do you know where you are?" - a beefy cop with a condescending smile, addressing me and the only other white person waiting at the bus stop. The cop did not offer rides to any of the other people waiting late at night, including the women. The fact is, I DID know where I was, and I was fine waiting with my coworker at the stop. If I'd accepted the ride, I think I'd be afflicted with a case of white guilt that would actually be warranted. Besides, where are these schmucks when something fishy does happen five feet away from where I'm standing? Off serving as a taxi service to white folks, I suppose.

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I Can Save the World (It's All in my Head)

Recently I have seen two films by Terry Gilliam, the American member of Monty Python. Yes, I know, I did not know there was an American Python. Shows what kind of Anglophile I am. Anyhoo, Gilliam was the Python animator, and it seems he is better suited as an animator or a film director, one who makes great film images, rather than just sitting around squawking in a Cockney accent. The second movie I saw, Twelve Monkeys, was a more commercial, accessible rehashing of the themes in Brazil. If you watch these films in the order in which they were made, you get a glimpse of Gilliam’s decades-long balancing act between being an artiste and a commercially viable director; indeed, these movies are “intelligent” and weird enough to be considered left-of-center, but shot on a grand visual scale that must have required mainstream studio bucks.
For films made ten years apart, they are strikingly similar. Both present a dystopic future that could be changed by one man if he had the strength—in both films, the hero struggles to change what has happened, even as he wonders if his monumental task is something he has dreamed up in his head. Even in The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen, Gilliam’s hero is a man who tells fantastic tales, lying to everyone (and perhaps himself) to escape a brutal historical reality. The escapist hero is a figure that obviously has resonance with Gilliam, as he keeps returning blurring the lines between reality and illusion, and dredging up the problematic solution that escapism poses for the hero’s troubles.

If you are into visuals, Brazil is your film. It is about an Anglo-American society that has a totalitarian, ponderously bureaucratic government and a population suffering either from grinding poverty or from reveling in decadence. Everything is in deep focus, so corridors go on forever. Add the Art Deco style (a nod to Metropolis?), and you see ominously gleaming floors of marble that stretch into the distance, like the hallways in Kubrick’s The Shining, only on such a grand scale that a single man is insignificant.



In the more talky scenes, there are surreal touches, such as the old woman who’s permanently wounded with disfiguring acid burns, a “complication” from a procedure meant to recapture her youth. There are tons of other details—a picket line with the sign “Consumers for Christ”—that are ingenious on their own, but make Brazil look overstuffed with ideas. For example, the sign: what is it saying is wrong about this society? The consumerism? The Christianity? Wouldn’t the existence of religion offer an alternative belief system to government propaganda? In addition, what is the significance of the kind of 1950s, post-WWII atmosphere of this society? Is it implying that the explosion of military-industrial development that characterized the Cold War was itself a move toward a fascist hegemony? There’s so much to see in Brazil that you don’t know where to look first, and you don’t have enough time to make sense of it all either.

Twelve Monkeys also presents a bleak future where the government does little to make anyone’s lives better. In this film, the state scientists have advanced to the point where they can manipulate history with time-travel, but they still commit egregious errors in the process, wreaking havoc on the hero’s sanity. As they say, good enough for government work.



Still, the problem of time travel, of never knowing where/when you are, and the doomed, cyclical nature of it all, make the Big Brother aspect of the film fade into scenery, and foregrounds more existential questions about man’s agency in the unfolding universe. Can hero change history this time? Or is he doomed to repeat the same desperate actions? This film was more commercially accessible, thanks to the participation of Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, and I think that the streamlined approach to plot also helped win audiences. By omitting the random cultural and historical references that made Brazil look as if it were overreaching, Gilliam made a movie that was focused enough to catch the popcorn-munching crowds and intelligent and compelling enough to engage more elitist viewers.

If you are a movie buff, and I will admit I’m turning into one, I’d recommend seeing both films. Loads of people have seen Twelve Monkeys but far fewer have seen Brazil, which brings up many of the themes that are later revised for accessibility in the Bruce Willis vehicle. Lately Terry Gilliam has had troubles with movie studios, and he likes to grouse about the perils of making a Hollywood film while still maintaining his identity as an artist, but I think his gradual evolution toward commercial success has been quite graceful.

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Inverse, Converse, Obverse

I have no idea how to use these words correctly. Well, that's not entirely true--I have some idea, but I want clarification. If you know exactly what the differences are between these two terms, please enlighten.

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I am not K-Fed (a post kind of about Britney, but really about me)

Britney filed for divorce a few days ago...yes, I care about Britney Spears, and I still care about literature. I can care about both things at the same time! I'm a complex person dammit! I contain large multitudes! Let me tell you I am so relieved that she finally left the guy. Everything about him said "loser," and it was obvious Britney was funding his lifestyle. Anybody who had an ounce of sense also knew that they had serious problems throughout their relationship, but K-Fed was so stupid that he was caught by surprise when Britney up and left him....

huh.

Okay, so that actually sounds familiar, or at least, I could imagine people talking about me the same way people talk about Kevin Federline. My ex-boyfriend made more money than me, and he was attached to a certain kind of lifestyle (i.e. no cooking, having groceries delivered, because God forbid he walk a fucking block to get them) that I couldn't afford, so I made him pay for things. But I did kick in half the rent. Also, because of income disparity and his refusal to do his half of the housework (even though I was a full-time student too, trying get into extremely competitive grad programs, and my time was at a premium), and other issues mean we had problems the whole year we were together. Still, the Sunday before last, when he said, "I just don't want to do this anymore," I was shocked.

After a year of just giving in to a situation that's not great, you start to convince yourself that eventually there will be a big payoff--eventually it will be alright in the end. Eventually the asshole will grow up and give you all the love and support that you've been giving him. It's not a smart way of thinking, but it happens, and I wasn't helped by the fact that members of his family, particularly his mother, would "promise" that he loved me, and that once he got through the stressful time of making up classes, everything would be alright. I should have realized that their real interest was in making sure that he had a female partner, a glorified housemaid, to give him stability. They didn't really care about me. So they set me up to be dumped by this jerk after I'd rearranged my life for him.

I'm sure that a lot of "our" mutual friends have also reinforced the idea that I should come second in the relationship. After all, because my ex had the good judgment to be born a year before me, he was able to get into grad school before me, and so everything he did was just SO MUCH MORE IMPORTANT than anything I did, and I should just abandon any dreams of having my own academic career if I wanted to be a "good girlfriend." I know for a fact that one of his good friends told him to not even consider having a long-distance relationship with me, that it would be too "hard" resisting the temptation to cheat. Apparently I am not allowed to have the relationship I want AND the career I want. Men can have both because women will quit their jobs, move to different states (or countries), and "make the relationship work." Well I suppose if I were to turn myself into a suitcase that my hubby can pick up and take anywhere, I could make my relationship work too. But what kind of relationship would that be? Would I be happy having my dreams and desires ignored and being treated like a subhuman entity? Probably not.

For the record, I AM NOT K-FED. I was not a freeloader or a burden. I did everything I could to be supportive of my ex's career, while at the same time attending to my own goals and my work obligations. I was trying to do a superhuman balancing act that would have been monumentally easier if my ex cared about me and actually tried to lighten my load, but in the end, he decided that he didn't love me, and he repaid all of my love with betrayal.

And if any of my ex's friends are reading this, I want you to know that I don't appreciate your telling him that it would be too "hard" to stay faithful to me, that it was okay for him to criticize my body when our sex life wasn't great, and that he shouldn't try to support my academic career. I also don't appreciate that you told him that one month was too long to wait for me to find an apartment, letting him think that it was ok to tell me to "hurry" on finding a new place to live when I'm trying to submit ten PhD applications. Ultimately, my ex is getting what he wants, and I'm getting my heart broken after being manipulated for a year, so he can wait a fucking month while I do my shit. If you said any of these things, you're not really my friend, so don't act like it. Fuck off.

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Jane

So I've taken the GRE subject test in Literature in English and a lot of the questions were related to 17thC/Restoration/18thC writers. So I didn't totally choke. Strangely enough, there were no questions related to Shakespeare that I can remember, and there was a series of questions related to Pride and Prejudice, which I thought would have been too obvious or well-known for a test like this. Anyhoo, right after I took the test, I opened my email and had 15 spams from "Britney Whitney" or whomever, and the text of each spam was an excerpt from Pride and Prejudice. Is the ghost of Jane Austen haunting me for the hack paper I wrote on her?

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Verbiage

I'm taking the GRE Lit test VERY soon. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

"Heav'n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn'd,
Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn'd." - William Congreve, The Mourning Bride , 1697.

"I hate all monarchs, and the thrones they sit on,
From the hector of France to the cully of Britain." - John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, circa 1670.

"FIDELITY n. A virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed." - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911.

"Be an Englishman, be an Irishman, be a Scottishman, be a Welshman. STAND UP." - John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, in the podcast for the Anglomania Met exhibit 2006. ok, it's not literary, but I still like it, so SOD OFF.

"Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." - William Shakespeare, Macbeth, circa 1603.

"A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." - Irina Dunn.

"Rosencrantz: Fire!
Guildenstern: Where?
Rosencrantz: It's all right - I'm demonstrating the misuse of free speech." - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, 1968.

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