Welcome to Plan B.
Okay, well, several things since last post. Two weeks ago we finally had a weekend off from band, which was refreshing. I didn’t end up doing much, but it was good to have a relaxing weekend. We watched Sphere. I had forgotten how good it was. I think the book is even better, though. I would highly recommend both of them. This weekend we watched The Breakfast Club, one of the great 80’s coming-of-age films. It was filmed at a high school near my home town, and the final shot of Bender walking across the football field was filmed at my high school’s stadium.
Next weekend is the Vanderbilt Marching Invitational where the Spirit of Gold hosts a high school marching competition. The event is run entirely by SOG students, and the money we make goes to our scholarship. It should be a lot of work, but a lot of fun. We’re required to work half the day, and TBS people have to work the whole day. I’m not in TBS, but I signed up for the whole day in a desperate attempt to garner as many brownie points as I can in my quest to become drum major next year.
Unfortunately I had to miss rehearsal on Friday. It was the only rehearsal I’ve missed so far, and I haven’t been late to any. Anyway, I missed it because I went to hear Salman Rushdie speak. He was incredibly articulate (as one might hope) and very funny. He had some interesting things to say on the role of the author in the 21st century. It was interesting to see how his opinions were informed by his own situation and literary history.
During the Q&A:
Audience member: “How do you think one should cultivate an appreciation for literature?”
Salman Rushdie: “Well, reading helps.”
Reading: Light in Ausust (still) William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying William Faulkner
Midnight’s Children Salman Rushdie
Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakami
Listening to: Five Iron Frenzy
We’re not going to make it. He explained how the End will come.
It’s amazing. We’re a quarter of the way through the semester already, and it still doesn’t feel like classes have gotten into full swing yet. So far I’ve only had one paper due (aside from 2 weekly poems so far for my poetry workshop). No tests or quizzes so far. I actually think I’m only going to have a few tests this semester (as in 3 or 4 in all of my classes total).
I’ve started volunteering at the school theater’s costume shop as extra credit for my theater class. If I put in 20 hours I get 3 percent added to my final grade. It’s a lot of time, but it’s also a lot of extra credit, and I heard that a lot of people who didn’t do it regretted their decision when final grades came in. At any rate I’m enjoying, despite the fact that I think the people who run it don’t think I can sew because I’m a guy. I’ve been working extra hard to prove them wrong and make Ms. Halajian proud.
As far as volunteer work goes, Jonathan Ertelt (the greenhouse manager) and myself finally got around to tackling the staghorn fern that we’d been putting off for weeks. It had been living in the same hanging basket for 6 years, and was incredibly overgrown, having produced many pups that hung from the sides, bottom, and even top of the basket. We used wire cutters to cut the basket to pieces in order to remove the root system without too much damage. Then we used a saw to cut the dirt, no inexorably tangled with roots, into pieces.
The staghorn fern (Platycerium sp.) is actually a really cool plant. It is epiphytic and grows on the sides of trees in the wild, producing two different types of fronds, or leaves. One kind, called shield fronds, are semicircular or kidney shaped and grow flat against the tree. These can get up to 3 feet wide on mature plants. The top part of these fronds will often bend away from the tree, causing water and debris to collect between the frond and the tree. This ensures that the roots will stay wet enough and have a constant source of nutrients. The other kind of frond grows from the middle of the plant and arches away from the tree, hanging in the air. These foliar or reproductive fronds bifurcate in a way that is visually similar to stags’ horns, and can reach lengths of 5 feet. Spores are produced in sheets on the underside of these fronds either at the end or near a fork. Mr. Ertelt is letting me take one of the pups for my dorm room (don’t worry, it’s young and only 6 inches on any side). Let’s see if I can keep it alive.
Listening to: all of my vinyl classical records
What is my eating, but another shape of going, my immaculate expiration?
I am officially and inescapably sick. Every time I get sick I try to deny it for as long as I can, as though refusal to admit the facts somehow makes them not true. Occasionally it works, and I get better before I acknowledge that I’m sick. Not this time however. I could feel my lymph nodes starting to swell two days ago, and I awoke yesterday with a dry throat. Both of these are ignorable symptoms, as long as they are not extreme (which they weren’t). But as I lay down to sleep two nights ago and felt my nose begin to run, I knew my immune system had finally caught up to me. Thus followed a long night filled with kleenex. Since my nose has not stopped running all day, I am bearing down for a cold that I hope won’t be as bad as it feels like it’s going to be.
In related news, my voice is still hoarse from the game on Saturday. Vandy beat Ole Miss by quite a bit. It was a great game, and the weather was perfect for marching.
I’m really liking my poetry workshop. The people are all really interesting. Some of the poetry is bad, and some of it is better than mine (by which I mean good). I enjoy reading poetry by other amateur poets my age. It’s almost a voyeuristic peek inside that person that you don’t get just by talking to them.
Midnight’s Children is really good. I’m only 75 pages into the 530 page book. I’m thinking I might not be able to finish it before Salman Rushdie comes to speak, but I will have at least read a little of his works.
The 1st floor RA of my dorm just walked by as I was listening to “Mars” from Gustav Holst’s The Planets and commented that it was odd for someone to be listening to the Starwars music so intently. He’s lucky I didn’t launch out of my chair at his throat. Instead I quietly explained that John Williams, who steals ideas from composers like Holst, did the Starwars music. What has the world come to?
Listening to: Tommy by The Who
That was to come later, when life had begun to go so fast that accepting would take the place of knowing and believing.
Wow, school has already kicked into full gear here at Vanderbilt. I had my first paper due yesterday. I didn’t sleep Monday night, staying up to write it. It was about how Joe Christmas’ character was a product of the union of several dichotomies. Whereas papers that I write entirely the night before (being all of the papers that I write) usually suck, this one actually turned out really well. I’m actually kind of proud of it. It was a solid eight pages, too, which gives me hope for a few 12-15 page papers I have coming up later in the semester.
I also had a ballad due yesterday. Though I’ve written a lot of poetry, I’ve never written one in a form. It was a challenge not only to get it into the form (meter and rhyme), but I was unused to writing such about such concrete subject matter. Most of my poems are really abstract, and he wanted our ballads to tell “a personal or small-scale story situated within a larger social context, told in the third person, with the use of cliches and repetitive lines.” It went against everything I had ever written before, which was always abstract, non-repetitive, used first person a lot, and self-consciously avoidant of cliche. This class is going to be a challenge. I’m also going to have to get over my aversion to letting other people read my poetry.
I saw Superbad the other day with my friends. I was expecting really stupid entertainment, though I knew absolutely nothing about it before hand. The previews were very uninformative about the plot or even themes of the movie. It was rougher than I had expected. The language was explicit, sometimes gratuitous. The sexual themes were overt, but I suppose a clear portrayal of American high school life. However, I was very pleasantly surprised at the ending. Unlike most stupid teen sex comedies, the ultimate message of Superbad was that you don’t have to get drunk and have sex with someone as soon as possible. It is indeed possible to have meaningful and fulfilling relationships without having sex. The main characters actually had morals, but were presented in a realistic, human way with flaws. It was refreshing to see that in a mainstream film; I greatly appreciated it.
In other news, the famous young-adult author Medeleine L’Engle died last Thursday, September 6 at the age of 88. She was the Newbery Award winning author of such books as A Wrinkle in Time, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and A Wind in the Door. Her books, especially A Wrinkle in Time, were an important part of my childhood. I probably read A Wrinkle in Time nine or ten times, often in one sitting. If you have never read it, you should take two or three hours to do so.
Also, Salman Rushdie is coming to speak at Vanderbilt on Friday Septermber 28th. Rushdie is an Indian-born novelist, and one of the most influential contemporary writers. His style primarily is magical realism, a genre that mixes realistic or historical fiction with a little fantasy. For example, one of his books focus on the independence of India and the social climate of that area and era, but one of the characters is telepathic. He is most famous for his novels The Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children. The Satanic Verses was banned in several countries with large Islamic populations for what they considered an unfavorable representation of the prophet Muhammad. After the publication of this book, there were several riots where people associated with the translation and publication of the book were killed. Several attempts were made on Rushdie’s life, and the Iranian spiritual leader placed a bounty on Rushdie’s head. Rushdie then moved to Great Britain for protection, where he subsequently became a citizen. He is now a writer in residence one month a year at Emory University.
I’m very excited for him to come. I know it’s an incredibly geeky English thing, but he really has been incredibly influential. He’s going to be talking about “the role of the writer in the 21st century,” which is exciting for me as an aspiring author. I’m going to try to read either The Satanic Verses or Midnight’s Children before I go hear him speak. It may not happen because of my classwork load, but I would like to have at least read something of his before I go hear him.
Listening to: Devendra Banhart
Reading: The Satanic Verses or Midnight’s Children and Light in August
Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.
Well, school is officially in full swing. Here’s a rundown of how my classes are so far:
Theater 100: The professor is very funny, though I feel like he tries a little hard sometimes. I’m excited for the final which is to write, direct, design, and perform an original play in groups.
American Jewish Culture: This class is going to be considerably harder than I expected, but I really like the professor. I have to fill out three worksheets to establish a working knowledge of Jewish traditions/demographics, etc.
Gender & Sexuality: This class has turned out to be a class on feminism, for the most part. There is some discussion of the male, and I think I’m going to focus my papers mostly on men, since that is what I’m particularly interested in. The professor is kind of absent minded, but also very articulate.
English 118 William Faulkner: I already have a 5-6 page paper on Light in August due Tuesday. That’s going to be interesting, seeing as we’ve only had three classes so far. The professor speaks really slowly and quietly. There is a somewhat frustrating lack of class discussion, so I guess most of my thinking and idea generating will have to be done on my own. On a better note, I had forgotten how much I really enjoyed reading Faulkner.
Intermediate Poetry Workshop: It’s going to be interesting to see how this class plays out. We’ve met once; the professor is kind of weird, and the other students look interesting. We have a ballad due on Tuesday, and I have no idea what I’m going to write about. I haven’t written a poem in several months, and here I am diving straight in form poems which I’ve never done before. Still, I’m excited for it.
We had our first football game last Saturday against the Richmond Spiders. We beat them 41 to 17, which was awesome. I’m beginning to think that we might actually have a good team this year. The band did well. There were some issues with parade marching, and the formation of the “V” at the end of the field, but I was proud of us and satisfied with the performance as a first game. We only have seven more home games to go! I’ve decided that I’m going to run for Sophomore class representative as a way of introducing myself into leadership positions and showing Dr. Sagen and Mr. Smith that I’m serious about the band and becoming drum major.
In yesterday’s edition of The Hustler, Vanderbilt’s student newspaper, there was an editorial by the regular columnist Andrew Solomon entitled “Don’t let your beer emasculate you: Drink from a can or a mug.” He goes on to describe an experience he had while “whoring [himself] out to a large aerospace corporation” in Houston as a summer internship. He was at a bar in this “wonderfully magical utopia for tools,” and ends up next to a guy who orders a Stella Artois which he describes as “hog swill marketed to posers and morons.” He goes on to say that the beer, which is served in a chalice-like mug, manages to emasculate even the people standing near the drinker. The article, while funny and not poorly written, outraged me. How dare he define “masculine,” especially in the progressive atmosphere of a university in what is already the most progressive and historically non-sexist of all eras? The very idea that boundaries should be set on my masculinity is offensive to me as a man; that the container in which my beer is served somehow affects my status as a man is cretinous and antithetical to my personal value and moral systems.
The mindset motivating Solomon’s article is exactly what modern feminism (both males and females alike) are fighting against. The only purpose that spewing such regressive, sexist stereotypes could possibly serve is to perpetuate such stereotypes and expectations, leading to the further subjugation of males by normative societal conventions. It is frustrating to see this as a person trying so hard to tear down preconceived notions of what it means to be “masculine.” Interestingly, Solomon says later in the article that “you should drink beer because you like it, not because you think it will impress people.” First of all, he here ignores the possibility that perhaps people enjoy Stella Artois. He denies the intelligent cognitive autonomy of individuals by simply assuming that their decision was based solely on a self-conscious awareness of others’ perceptions of the individual. He is in effect stating that all opinions other than his are simultaneously wrong and not well though out.
The quotation, more disturbingly, shows that Solomon does not realize that he is doing the same that he accuses Stella Artois of doing, namely forcing people to be self-conscious in their choice of drink. He claims that the only acceptable containers for beer are cans, bottles, Solo cups, and glasses, deeming all others unacceptable and emasculating (his words are “you look like a pansy simply by sitting next to [beer not in one of these containers]). He is trying to shame males into making choices based on others’ perceptions and not on personal preference, despite his claim to the contrary. I am outraged and embarrassed that such chauvinistic propaganda is coming from someone who shares my gender. I for one refuse to subscribe to his limiting, devaluing, sexist dogma.
My parents sent me two interesting articles from my hometown paper in the mail the other day. One was a letter to the editor commenting that while Deerfield has been very focused on underage drinking recently, there has been little to no mention of drug use. Marijuana was involved in more than one of the instances that have occurred in the past year. Yet, there have been even fewer arrests for drug and paraphernalia possession than for consumption or possession of alcohol by a minor. My understanding (and correct me if I’m wrong) is that it is illegal to posses or use marijuana at any age. I have come to the firm conclusion that the Deerfield police do not care at all about ameliorating any underage drug or alcohol problems our community has. Actions against teens have been perfunctory and largely symbolic, intended only to assuage the immediate fears of parents.
The second article was headlined “Another teen with ties to drinking trial is arrested.” The second paragraph states “[John Smith], 19, was arrested Aug. 12 after a caller to police said he saw a teen staggering down Avenue and also lying in the grass.” [Smith} also testified at the trial of the Hutsells last month. I think it is now unavoidably obvious that the problem does not lie with the Hutsells, or even with most of the parents (though I am in no way attempting to negate the culpability of irresponsible parents who do throw (or passively condone) parties). The demographic at fault is not being held accountable. While I do think that a mistake like underage drinking should ruin a person’s life, I also find it ridiculous and regressive to give amnesty to (or just simply not arrest or charge) people who do this.
Listening to: Iron & Wine, Infected Mushroom, and Sufjan Stevens
Reading: Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakami
The System: Marching Band Methods Gary Smith
Light in August William Faulkner
