With a little bit of luck

It's december, we had a little bit of snow for the first time yesterday (rather late considering the stretch of Michigan winters), and the year is slowly coming to a close. I find it pathetic, though fitting, that I have written only 17 posts in 2009: A lousy number of updates for a lousy year. The last two months have turned the bitter course of events around and things have gotten considerably better but that won't make a big change in the status of the blog now that I am finally writing my dissertation and have no life to report on. On a relevant note, TCM was showing My Fair Lady the other day and I left the TV on to see if I would remember any of the song and dance pieces. The film did not engage me much this time (one would expect any film with Audrey Hepburn in it and structured like a fairy tale to be much more captivating) but Alfred Dolittle's song "With a little bit of luck" suddenly hit the right chord in terms of how I feel about my life and the overwhelming task of dissertation writing/academic job search right now:

Alfred: The Lord above gave man an arm of iron
So he could do his job and never shirk.
The Lord gave man an arm of iron-but
With a little bit of luck, With a little bit of luck,
Someone else'll do the blinkin' work!
The trio: With a little bit...with a little bit...
With a little bit of luck you'll never work!



Santa, this song goes to you if you're listening. A little bit of luck is what I need for 2010 so someone else can write my dissertation and do all the work!

Some trivial updates from the weekend:
- I wrote 5 more cards, bringing my mate-real card total count to 13.
- Almost killed half of the people in a bar by playing darts.
- Caught cold by the sheer act of leaving the house and socializing for a change.
- Started decorations shopping for my upcoming A-pathetic Christmas party.
- Tested negative for tb (The university is requiring all international students to be tested for tuberculosis this semester. They will ask for rabies and distemper shots next, I think)
- Scheduled a hair cut for the puppy. Can't wait to see him look fancy and decently groomed on wednesday.

Material Girl

I started writing my new year cards last night, as part of my "send a mate-real card for 2010" campaign, which I announced on facebook. It is not a serious campaign really, I just miss the process of connecting with friends in material ways and the colorful sight of cards, stamps, and envelopes from around the world displayed on my refrigerator (yes, the fridge is a magical place where the world gets together). Of course, after the first card, I was immediately reminded that a) my handwriting is deteriorating faster than my youth b) it takes forever to write a single card, since I delve into reminiscing old days and daydreaming about the future every time I put pen on paper c) I better focus on the materiality of my dissertation, which is progressing at a painfully slow pace, with the same vigor too or stop getting into the spirit of the holiday so much as it makes me feel guilty about not being serious enough for the task. What's the big deal about writing a few cards? Well, I also accepted to throw a non-religious/a-pathetic Christmas party with my upstairs neighbor, who suggested that opening both floors of the Tudor house for friends would be a cool idea. Once again, let's hope I won't get too distracted with all this.

On a side note, Lok told me about the Paul Auster-esque disappearance of Philip Agre, a professor from UCLA whom he admired greatly. Agre was apparently somewhat disillusioned by academia and slowly slid into oblivion, by first not publishing or producing anything new in 5 years and then disappearing from the face of the world altogether. That puts a whole new perspective on the phrase "publish or perish." I wonder if that's the fate awaiting us all: isolating ourselves in our abstract worlds of books, dissertations, and publications, and eventually disintegrating in our loneliness.

No Compilation for Old Men

Compilation sickness is the name of a new malady that seems to have taken control of my life in the past 4 weeks. Trying to expand the paper on "Virtuality and Anticipation in Videograms of a Revolution," which I presented at the Visible Evidence Conference in august, into a dissertation chapter evaluating the film within the broader context of the compilation film and media tradition, I have indulged in a desperate research about video compilations. Desperate because nothing has been written about the topic and also, because I got seduced by the world of found-footage films along the way. OD'ing on the films of Peter Forgacs or Gianikian is apparently not helping my cause right now, as I have been staring at and rewriting the same 3 pages, containing mediocre statements about how interesting the coupling between The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty and VOR is, in the last 2 weeks. Sad really, as that is not even the point; however, I simply can't wrap my mind around what I am trying to say since my mind keeps wandering back to the good old safe waters of the analog film and home movies-based compdocs. Video, my friends, is no country for old men, by which I mean old fashioned academics, who are stuck in thinking and dreaming about celluloid. Now how to stop thinking about Wittgenstein Tractatus - "that's the Younger Jim" (to echo sheriff Ed Tom Bell's introductory voice-over in No Country for Old Men) - and go back to executing Ceaucescu...

Nouveau steampunk

It's holiday season, once again, in the US. Halloween has just expired, thanksgiving is on the way, and countdown to christmas ads are already aired on Tv, reminding me that I should really make an effort to learn what holiday is on what date, now that I've been living in this country for 6 years. Well, at least this year, I genuinely considered dressing up for the first time, as Riese, the wanderer-hero of the new internet-based steampunk series. My lack of interest in mingling with people in order to display the costume took over, of course, and I spent the night passing out candy at my place with Christina and Jim instead. Still thinking of steampunking myself by getting goggles, capes, and clock-art accessories for daily wear though. I bet nobody would find the style anachronistic in Detroit.

Other than the usual misanthropy and occasional thoughts about eternal homelessness, things are going pretty good so far lately. The fairy tale house is dreamy (a friend of mine moved upstairs so now I have a cool neighbor too), the dissertation research is going extremely slow but is quite engaging, my academic life is drama free (the film program is growing so we have more visibility and respect in the department this year, I think), and I even found out that I don't have to teach composition in winter (I almost dropped out of school when they forced me to do that last spring!). Stars must be aligned. Now if only I could write more efficiently, since with this pace, I'll never finish the dissertation.

Good news

Today, I found out that my paper titled "Reassembling the Nation: Iraq in Fragments and the Acoustics of Occupation" is accepted for publication in the special theme issue of the journal Studies in Documentary Film, dedicated to post-9/11 media. I am delighted of course, since I really enjoyed writing that piece, presenting it at the Glasgow conference (which turned out to be one of my best conference experiences), expanding it for the prospectus (worked pretty well), and revising it for publication. But also, I think I am finally figuring out how to do things efficiently in grad school: The last two pieces I presented at conferences have both been sent to journals and accepted, and I am getting comfortable with the "write a conference paper first and expand it into a publishable format later" system. Let's hope the same works on what I am writing on now too (an expanded version of what I presented at the Visible Evidence Conference in august).

Queen of Convenience

Woke up earlier than usual this morning with Dziga tossing and turning next to me. I recently started allowing him to sleep with me, which is probably a big mistake but somehow I find his jumping on the bed in the middle of the night and pushing me to the side with all the might of his bear-like torso amusing, if not endearing. After a quick shower, I got back into bed and started listening to Kings of Convenience on itunes, while meandering through the net. KoC always reminds me of Lok, probably because he was the one that made me listen to the band first; but the song "Homesick" particularly made me think of him since the lyrics evoked our conversations about feeling placeless or lacking a sense of belonging in the strangely small and alienating academic world of this vast continent. Other than that, I don't feel especially homesick these days; in fact, the Bavarian-Tudor house is rather "heimlich" if you pardon my German. But I do feel like the queen of convenience, going through the routine I created every day without daring to imagine a life different, a life without procrastination, academic angst, and autumnal ennui.

Homesick

I lose some sales
and my boss won't be happy
but I can't stop listening to the sound
of two soft voices blended in perfection
from the reels of this record that I found

every day there's a boy in the mirror
asking me
what are you doing here
finding all my previous motives
growing increasingly unclear

I travelled far and I burned all the bridges
I believed as SOON as I hit land
all the other
options held before me
WILL wither in the light of my plan

so I lose some sales
and my boss won't be happy
but there's only one thing on my mind
searching boxes underneath the counter
on a chance that on a tape I'd find

a song for
someone who needs somewhere
to long for

homesick
cause I no longer know
what home is

* Image shows a restored portrait of the 14-year-old Mary Tudor.

First Day of Fall

Today, as I took Dziga to his daily walks around my neighborhood, it felt unmistakably like the first day of fall with intermittent drizzling rain, cold weather, and a visible trail of autumn leaves on the sidewalks (the colors of which are amplified by the pumpkins placed in front of porches, in early preparation for the upcoming Halloween). The universe is trying to give me a little push in my academic endeavors, I think, since I had decided during the weekend to resume dissertation work this monday and needed a notable mark of transition. Though the swift seasonal change helped me shift attention to the awaiting task at hand (the hitherto deserted dissertation to be from here-on disserted), I had difficulty figuring out where to begin and coming up with an ingenious strategy all day. Ah well, it's always hard to get back on track once you give a break. Let's hope I can get a few pages written this week to set things in motion.

In the meantime, the house is looking better and better each day. Christina and I went on a short Ikea trip on saturday and found a nice and conveniently cheap couch in the returned items section. It is a little modern in style but blended in well with the rest of the living room once we put a few multi-colored pillows on it. With the couch in, the place feels super cozy now. I also found out that cable shows BBC world news everyday at 6:30 pm so I feel like living in a sanctuary, sitting in my old timey living room, watching tv and listening to the rain outside.