It was seven years ago today that I became a professor at the University of Minnesota.
And it was seven years minus one week ago that I walked out of my car after teaching my first class and thought "I'm the professor? Oh no, they're all doomed." Then I broke out laughing.
My first year as a professor--or maybe just my first semester as a professor--I was fascinated by it. I honestly never thought I would finish college, much less graduate school, much less get a job, much less get a job and stay in it for as long as I have. When I walk out to my car today, I'm going to try to remember how I felt walking to fourth street ramp that first day. I was utterly fascinated. Elated. Dumbfounded.
I'm going to try to remember that, because I'm starting to get to be as jaded and bitter as people who I used to resent for being so jaded and bitter. I'm going to try to remember all of the happy moments in my career: that first day, getting my dissertation published, getting my first internal grant, and getting my first external grant. I'm going to try to remember the phrase that my mom had framed in the kitchen, Illegitimi non carborundum, a mock-Latin (and mock-grammatical, for that matter) expression that means more to me today than when I first learned its meaning, 30+ years ago. And yes, when my mom told me the meaning, she used the "b" word. Back then it was a scandal. These days, it's considered good clean language.
I haven't been sleeping well lately. I lay awake at night (correction: I sometimes lay in bed, and sometimes I pace the room, and sometimes [Sunday evening] I bolt out of bed at 11:30 pm and start beating my fits on the walls out of frustration, but I digress) thinking of all of the things I should be doing that I'm not. Call it a mid-life crisis, a mid-career slump, or just self-pity, whatever it is, it's keeping me awake at night (and the fist-wall-beating thing, the less said about which, the better. My eight-year-old temper tantrum tendencies have returned, OK?).
As I was falling asleep last night, I was thinking that I would write a blog entry today, to give the illusion of productivity. What does a person write when he has nothing intelligent to say? A list, of course! I was going to write a blog entry parodying the books "1001 X's you have to Y before you die." We have a few of these in our household: 1001 movies you have to see before you die (which omits such greats as Short Cuts and the Honeymoon Killers), 1001 albums you have to listen to before you die (which seems to focus on a fairly narrow set of genres), and 1001 novels you have to read before you die (the editors of which seem to have dedicated their lives to the worship of McEwan and Coetzee). I was going to write 1001 meals you have to eat before you die, like "Cassoulet and Rabbit tartine," "lamb vindaloo", and "tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich."
Well, today I read the dumbest list ever, and it pretty much took the wind out of my list-writing sails. The list can be found at http://www.totalfilm.com/features/the_greatest_directors_ever_-_part_2. It's a list of the 100 best film directors ever. Boy, is it atrocious. Horrible. I hope that the film-lovers in my readership (where "readership" seems to be defined as "my sister, my dad, Molly Babel, Erdem Durgunoglu, and Ryan Johnson) will take a look at it, just to see how bad it is.
Let's highlight just a few of the crap-tacular choices made on this list:
(1) David Fincher is #10! That's right, the man who directed Alien^3 and Panic Room is in the TOP TEN. And why? On what is this based? It seems to be based on one movie, the enjoyable and interesting but hugely overrated Fight Club. Give me a break! One interesting movie--the most interesting aspects of which are largely from the source material.
(2) Billy Wilder is only #13 (behind Fincher, AND Peter Jackson AND the most over-hyped, hive-inducing, jerk in cinematic history, Quentin Tarentino). Did I read that correctly? Billy Wilder is one of the most significant artists of the postwar period, regardless of medium. He should be in the top three. Living proof that whoever wrote this list doesn't know squat about historic context. I weep at their stupidity.
(3) Woody Allen is only #19, and he's behind not only Fincher and Jackson and Tarentino, but also Steven Soderbergh and David Cronenberg! OK, I admire Soderbergh, and I love Cronenberg's surrealist style--heck, I'd love to be able to insert videotapes into my viscera--but Woody Allen clearly has much more to say about the human condition than both of them combined.
(4) Altman is at #26. I vomited when I saw this.
This moronic list not only made me scream with rage, it put me off list-writing forever. I should just quit the blog right now! What else do I have? Cute kitty stories? Not likely--she's as fat as a hippo and twice as surly. Baby pictures? Well, yes, plenty of those, but blogs are supposed to be a textual medium.
Maybe I should just get to work and stop screwing around writing blog entries.
If you missed ICPhS 2007, then you missed a great conference. Conferences this good don't come along terribly often--ICPhs, Labphon, SRCLD--that's about it. This was a really great opportunity to meet some people whom I had always wanted to meet, and to see old friends. Seeing Joyce McDonough and Stefanie Jannedy made the heart flutter and bleed, just like Judy in A Star is Born. (The gays know what I'm talking about.) Also, my posters generated a decent level of interest and attention.
It was fun.
I feel lucky to lead a life where I get to go to places like ICPhS. My only regret? I miss Kevin, and, to a far lesser extent, Carrie (our cat). Saarbrucken would have been much more fun with them. Does New Zealand have a law about cats as temporary visitors? How will I live without little wuggums when I'm an Erskine professor next summer?