In preparation for moving, we did some computer backups and re-arrangements (don't you love my technical jargon?) yesterday. Overnight, while the computer was defragging itself, some apparently-key bits of the Windows OS got, um, misplaced.
So breakfast was a sad meal. All seemed lost - email address book, all email, all bookmarks (including the ones I'm using for my paper on Atlanta's economy, due this week). But B was able to fix everything, and I'm back up on the Web.
Please don't email me about backups. I actually DO have multiple copies of important documents like research I'm doing, and I DO archive finished products. It's the daily stuff I don't really do much with.
During my last day of work, almost two years ago now, our IT administrator "thought" I was finished for the day/month/year/forever, and "for security reasons" deleted all my stuff remotely. He finished by changing my passwords so that I couldn't use my computer at all. Since I was still working on my final status report and had planned to save selected emails/addresses for future reference, it was pretty upsetting. People in my office told me they heard language they'd never heard in all the years they'd worked with me.
After I went ballistic with him and then with his boss, he was suddenly able to restore my password and ordinary files, but he insisted that email and email addresses and bookmarks were irretrievably lost. (Do you think that would've been the answer if an FBI agent had been standing there with a subpoena?)
But I have to say that the event erased all possible future nostalgia and fear of regrets of having quit my job. Six hours later, I walked out the door, and I have never for one minute regretted leaving the place. Losing all that stuff was the techno-analog to "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out."
Ah, "good times," as Phil Hartman used to say when he played that smarmy talk-show host on Talk Radio. Funny how today's near-crisis brought back all the emotions of that day.
...PLEASE. Holding steady at #10.
To drop back to the whole urban density thing from a few entries ago, our guest lecturer today noted that Minneapolis is the LEAST dense of the 25 largest US metropolises. I don't know if that's really true (LA sprawl comes to mind) but it's verifiable enough. Still no word on density in Paris.
We now have two competitive prices on movers for next Saturday. It's more expensive than I thought it would be, but B and I are too old and too decrepit to "tote that barge and lift that bale" so movers it is. Moving is too disgusting a process to foist off on your friends under the guise of "hey, come on over, and have some pizza and beer and oh by the way, take some boxes upstairs on your way."
Our new place is on the second floor, as you may have guessed. But at least the stairs are INTERIOR. It is to be hoped that there'll be no accidents like this winter's, when someone fell down the unshoveled stairs and twisted his ankle and spent the next two months hobbling about.
All I think about is school. But I can't write about it: the schoolwork parts are too boring (even for me) and the people parts would be too offensive. "Tell us what you REALLY think"? No, that wouldn't be a good idea. Not at all.
I fell asleep a little while ago watching Stoned Phillips narrate a piece about satanic ritual in, yes, Texas. Well, if the Salem witchcraft trials are to be re-enacted, Texas seems like the sort of state that could accommodate them. One's first reaction is always righteous indignation that such things can happen in the 21st century, but then one thinks that probably lives are being ruined in this way, constantly, all around the world. It's just one of the infinitely many techniques that humans have for torturing one another.
It had to happen: I wanted to look at Foucault's article on heterotopia and then at a Hawthorne short story about a poisoned garden, and both are packed in boxes. "Rapuccini's Daughter"? I think that's the name. Hawthorne was a twisted soul. When I read the new bio of him a couple of years ago, though, I just wished I could have known him. Those are the best kinds of bios - you wish they would never end.
Ok, this is just stupid - but I have dropped from #9 in number of UThink entries to number 14 or something, so I have to write to better my position on the list. See, for me, not even blogging can be stress-free and uncompetitive.
I think we still don't have movers. I'm afraid to ask. Maybe on Friday I can think about it. We've packed a lot of boxes but somehow hardly made much of a dent in all the STUFF. Probably it reproduces when we're not home, or are otherwise absorbed watching Queer Eye or West Wing or something.
Did you know you can pretty much watch West Wing around the clock if you get enough cable channels? And that I once wrote an essay on it for my grammar and style class? And that I should be baking chicken right now instead of blogging? And that my class today was so boring that I was afraid I'd, unbeknowst to myself, end up standing up and screaming, "EVERYBODY SHUT UP ABOUT THEORY ALREADY! MOVE ON! GET A LIFE!"?
Our landlord showed our apartment today while poor B waited on the porch. For 75 minutes. Okay, it's a one-bedroom, alright? The guy could've drawn a full set of floor plans in that amount of time.
Okay, okay, the chicken. See you tomorrow...
13 days until we move. I was going to pack some boxes yesterday, but never quite got to it. Living in a place with bare bookshelves and walls and mantelpiece is depressing and a little disorienting. But I think I'd better deal with it and see what I can get done today.
This past week was just a horrorshow. The lecture notes that were unfinished in the last entry "disappeared" from my jump-drive - in that I could see the file listed, but when I tried to open it, the computer insisted that I had the wrong path. So I started over on Thursday morning (skipped a class to do it, gack) and didn't quite finish and gave a REALLY boring, abstract lecture that at least was mercifully TOO SHORT and my students were bored and disengaged and hated the case study I'd thrown together at the very last minute.
Instead of having 2 1/2 hours of seminar this week, we had TWO 3-hour sessions with some guest scholars instead. And when THAT was finally over on Friday, instead of making copies of next week's readings for my three classes, I just went home. I so CAN'T WAIT for this semester to be over. Three more weeks, plus a few days for exams, and it's summer freedom.
I read S Draculic's book How we survived communism - and even laughed yesterday, nominally because I can use some of it for my seminar paper (the draft of which was due on April 6) but actually because it's so wise. It's depressing though, to think that all those nations of people living under Communist rule were (egalitarianally) dirt-poor, and perpetually bowed down by the stupidity of a system they didn't choose. I can't really do it justice here, but: If the Eastern Bloc countries were a color, it would be grey. If they were a food, it would be cream of wheat cereal. Made with water instead of milk, no salt. If they were music, it would be the underlying drone of a bagpipe, without the tune.
And so on. You see my point. They saved everything - cardboard shoeboxes, bits of fabric, plastic yogurt containers, old pantyhose. You never know when you might be able to use that stuff. They would be shocked at the landfills of America.
For my paper, the point is how the vestiges of all that (the ghosts, to speak the lingo of the class) still persist. The people thought that the day after the Wall fell, everything would be different. In some ways it was different of course - but not always in good ways. Some people (the older ones) long for the old days.
Well, it's late, and I'm beat. Wednesdays are my day to prepare for teaching on Thursdays. I write up my lecture notes, prepare handouts, enlarge materials for transparencies, make copies of case law if I'm using any.
But because it's a "free" day (meaning unencumbered), appointments that don't fit elsewhere in the week tend to skitter along and land on Wednesdays. So, today I had a noon meeting and a meeting at 5 and one at 5:30 and class at 6 and another meeting at 8:30 - just enough to break up the rhythm of the day. You know that hour or so before you have to leave for somewhere when you look at the clock every couple of minutes and re-calculate when you have to leave and how much time you have left, and what you can achieve in that time? I'm usually pretty good about using small bits of time effectively, but not when I'm "waiting" for the next meeting.
Long and short - my lecture notes aren't done and I haven't finalized the next assignment, which I need to hand out tomorrow. I'm gonna try to go to bed and sleep - but if I can't, I might just get up and work some more. B is correcting rough drafts, and he has a few more hours of it.
More urban musings - Paris is so dense that when I came back from there, Minneapolis felt positively suburban by comparison. I want to get some numbers and compare people per square mile. Do the two huge parks in Paris reduce that density significantly? I think not - and one of the hints you get is that Parisians seem to need less personal space. They'll be closer in the street and in the subway and especially in restaurants than is tolerated here in the U.S. And they'll bump you slightly, or brush against you, and it's no big deal. Here, people get really offended - or scared - by such moves.
The numbers for Mpls will be easy to find. Not sure about Paris. Stay tuned...
Because I am trying to write a paper on urban ruins, and reading a bunch of stuff for seminar on same, I've been thinking about causes, typologies, etc.
There's aerial bombardment (Dresden). There's systematic bombardment (Warsaw). There's invasion (Rome). There's abandonment (Detroit - take a look at an incredible documentation of this at www.detroityes.com). There's decay (air pollution in Krakow).
Can we generalize in any way about the causes and forces of ruination, or does each city decay in its own way, for its own reasons, on its own schedule?
I probably have lots more to say about this topic, but I'd best save it for the paper.
All my courses are starting to blend together. I pick up an article from the stack, and without referring to my syllabi, I can't tell if it's an illustration of methodology (Geog 8002), a reflection on political use of space (Geog 8980) or an example of the role of unions in shaping the workforce (Pub Affairs 8204). Or even a possible reading for the course in construction law that I teach!
This convergence is probably a good thing, but right now it's disorienting. I had the same problem last term writing about literary geography in one course phenomenological approaches to literary representations of space in another.
Regardless, in four weeks, it will all be over. That's the great thing about school: every 14 weeks or so you sum up and move on and get to start fresh the next term. You'd have to start a new job to do that in "the real world."
(However, "the fresh start" is also an illusion. I expected a fresh start in Minneapolis and I find instead that my past endlessly complicates and reflects on my present.)
Yesterday B and I drove around our new neighborhood for awhile, to see what's available and how to get from various point As to various point Bs. This neighborhood, Elliott Park, is a pennisula surrounded on the south and east by interstates, on the north by industrial areas and the Metrodome, and on the west by downtown. Before the interstate was carved in a massive ditch through the city, our neighborhood was part of the neighborhood south of the interstate, a neighborhood of stately Victorian or Italianate houses with gorgeous detail. Now it's just a few blocks of "leftover." Moreover, as the housing stock declined after the highway was built, large-scale projects were seen as the solution, so there is an elderly housing complex across the street that takes up the whole block and some others further northeast of it. I find these disruptions of the street grid, the pre-existing rhythm of yard/building, and the entire scale of the large projects to be disconcerting, even annoying.
Still, it's interesting that the City of Minneapolis wants greater density and more population. I've never lived anywhere where that's been the case - elsewhere, people whine about development and how it's ruining their quality of life.
Other factoids about the 'hood': there is a coffee shop nearby. There is an Indian restaurant "coming soon." There is a Christian college around the corner, whose students are not allowed to dance, drink, smoke, gamble, OR WATCH R-RATED MOVIES. Also, they are not allowed to steal or lie etc. and unbelievably all these things are IN THE SAME LIST. Yeah, social dancing is bad, very bad. Moses must've dropped the tablet with THAT part of the list on his way down the mountain.
The Metrodome has a sort of ring-road around it, a one-way loop that shoots cars off to various on-ramps for the various highways. It will be interesting to see how well that works; it appears to be a miracle of rationalistic transportation engineering. The Dome, like the big housing projects, destroyed the existing grid-based fabric of the city, looking rather like a space ship that settled on a random four-block section of real estate.
Anyway, I'm sure I'll be writing much more about the new neighborhood in a few weeks. I love that hyper-vision you get in a new place, when you really SEE. Then you get used to it and you don't really see anything, unless something changes and you notice the contrast.
Happy Easter, everyone!
I love the feeling of an early Saturday morning, when two glorious days beckon, two days filled with nothing - no parties, no meetings, no classes. Not that I don't like parties - I just love the belief (erroneous, as it usually turns out) that the weekend is MINE, totally free of commitments.
Post-positivist geographers have already "proven" (what is proof?) that space is not a Euclidean container waiting to be filled with people or events. But they are still working on time and its annoying uni-directionality. Many of the readings in my seminar this term question the premise of History as a series of events leading just to this moment. I'm still working on this in my brain, though.
Theoretical controversies aside, the fillings for these particular days include:
1.Reading five long and complicated methodology articles and writing a short paper that summarizes the main points and evaluates them critically.
2.Writing a draft paper for my seminar that was due last Tuesday.
3.Reading a huge stack of seminar articles and websites, and leading a discussion on them on Friday.
4.Reading some articles assessing economic development tools.
5.Catching up on 3 weeks of French grammar and translation.
6.DOING OUR TAXES.
See? The container is already filled to overflowing and the day has barely begun. Which is worse: making a list, which clarifies that you have more to do than can possibly be done, and then being annoyed at your lack of achievement? Or NOT making a list, sauntering through the days, and panicking on Monday morning? I think I'll stick with the quiet desperation of the lists. It feels more grounded than denying reality for two days.
Oh, and also I'm going to reread Getting to Yes for my Construction class. When I find it - I looked yesterday but it wasn't where I expected it to be.
When I was working in city planning, although I ended up getting four weeks vacation a year, I could never use it all And when I did take a week off, I noticed this phenomenon:
You can work insane hours at insane tasks for weeks on end, and of course, before you go on vacation, you work even harder trying to clean off your desk and make sure everything will be "covered" while you're gone. This seems totally normal. Then you go away. When you come back, you just don't care; that Type A workaholic thing has vanished and you have no motivation to work late, or work weekends, or even work in the office. You wander around hoping someone will ask questions about your vacation, and you sit at your desk daydreaming about whiling away an afternoon sitting in a cafe drinking local wine and watching the world go by. And THIS seems totally normal.
Anyway, that's my state of mind at the moment. I've lost the flow of managing classes and jobs, squeezing the last bit of usefulness from every single minute. I've started this blog. Next thing you know, I'll probably be writing poetry, or outlining plots for novels.
Thursday nights are good. I've survived another week; my students haven't found out I'm faking it; my teachers haven't ranted about my lack of production. In short, my fraudulence lives to try it again next week.
I am thinking of reading Henry James's The Wings of the Dove this summer. And, as an antidote to the long sentences, perhaps something by Hemingway too. Probably I should read something new, though. Any suggestions for great novels that incorporate notions of place and space? It's depressing how there isn't enough time on the PLANET to read all the good stuff.
And on that happy note - until tomorrow...
I saw some experimental films tonight at the film festival, films that exploit the natural disintegration of nitrate emulsion to, what? Play a narrative role? Or – conversely - question the primacy of narrative in film?
I dislike the self-congratulatory flavor of critics of this sort of work – as if THEY have achieved something by understanding it, by recognizing basic themes (that, truth be told, are obvious to anyone with some training in the visual arts), by speaking about it in words that end frequently in –ment or –tion and in sentences that have no obvious agent.
Which brings me to my second point of the evening: I was so annoyed and frustrated by reading this sort of criticism that I had to assuage my jangled nerves by taking a dip in the cool waters of Joseph Williams’ book Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, and reminding myself that elegant prose is, if increasingly hard to find, still achievable with some effort and analytical willpower. Not that academics in general find this an interesting or worthwhile goal.
Before I started this doctoral program in Geography, I was in a masters program in English Literature, strictly for the love of it, with no need to get the degree or take the requisite courses, or any of the other quotidian matters that plagued my colleagues. I can honestly say that being there, in that program, was one of the true gifts of my life. I made some good friends there, and the lessons I learned there I will always remember.
I've wanted a blog for years, ever since I began reading the blogs of others, in fact.
It's harder than it looks - although I've kept a journal for almost thirty years, and am drawn to writing in it almost every day, the knowledge that this blog will be "public" carries some pressure, and invites the Censor and her friend Writers Block right on in.
(But what is public? If I write a blog and don't tell anyone about it, is it really public?)
Anyway. The promised beginning. I am a doctoral student in Geography, fulfilling a dream by going back to school after years in the city planning field. My years in city planning had a certain frenetic, high-pressure, high-profile aspect to them, and when things got really overwhelming, I'd think, well, wouldn't it be great to dump this rat-race and just simply sell Sno-Cones at the beach? It got to be part of the private lexicon that my husband and I share - a wry smile, a shrug, a word, "Sno-Cones?"
Think of it, though. You are out only in great weather (no point in selling Sno-Cones in the rain). You have a perpetual and glowing tan. You have a pickup truck, America's dream vehicle, to haul the Sno-Cone apparatus. The truck is probably blue. A bad day is when the ice isn't right, or the syrup spills. If it spills outside the truck, you can just drive on.
People smile when they see you, especially kids. You have customers who are regulars. You don't make much money, but it's enough to live on, and when things are tight, you can always sleep on the air-mattress in the back of the truck.
So, yeah, Sno-Cones. At the beach.