Best part about the packing process?
Watching Crispin hide and take naps in the various boxes and laundry baskets scattered throughout the house.
In other news, I'm feeling really low energy, isolated and sad these days. My inspiration and enthusiasm for Fiber Arts seems to have dropped off the face of the earth as the temperature crept towards 80. I need to turn my attention to the soul-harrowing process of applying for jobs, and deciding what I'm going to do with my life come September when the rest of the world as I know it goes Back To School.
Also, I taught myself how to use a manual roto-tiller. As in: the kind where the only power comes from my body, no fossil fuels involved. It was crazy hard work, but I was proud of the beautiful loose soil I created out of clay-y lumps.
I'm showing my summer-program students Casablanca. As we watch, I'm impressed with the wit, the subtlety of the script, the beauty of the images, but I'm hit over the head and in the gut again and again by the chauvinism. As if it were a 20 pound brick. I really kind of want to show them Campion's The Piano as an antidote, but don't think I can get away with showing a rated-r film to high-schoolers.
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I've never watched Casablanca, but can you perhaps use this as an opportunity to discuss the chauvinism in the film?
ReplyDeleteHmm. I think that the chauvinism in Casablanca is appropriate. That is, I don't think that the screenwriters are chauvinistic, rather that they are accurately portraying the attitudes of the time period. Not that that makes it ok, but rather it adds to the movie in the way that racism adds to The Invisible Man or White Tiger.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to add more examples here, say of child abuse as a vital theme in a book, but the truth is that some themes ruin a book for me, so I can't remember any. Maybe Beloved? (I hated that book). Probably I could think of some where drug abuse or backward attitudes about sex were important to the parts of the setting (basically everything by DFW).