Saturday, March 19, 2011
Lovely Saturday in the City: Going to Dance Class, Touched by Comments!
Aaahh... it is a glorious day in the city again, though quite chilly. I'm not quite energetic enough for Luigi class today, on top of which I am not sure if they take credit cards or CA checks, and the MBT fiasco ate through all of my cash... Thankfully, can write friend a check to see the psychic. Of course, anyone who knows me or simply looks at my info on FB, knows I am both secular and passionately anti--woo woo (Oprah philosophy, Shirley Maclaine (the books, not the movies of course), astrology as a serious predictor of human lives and the future, tarot cards and other such nonsense.
However, this woman knew nothing whatever about me. She asked me my date of birth and full name. No one was there and she was not hooked in to a Bluetooth or a laptop where she could have googled me. And there's nothing much there anymore. The AYA 15th reunion thing is gone. My essays on Denis Leary Discussions on FB are no longer listed. (I have 27 essays spanning his career , including his comedy ("No Cure for Cancer" and "Lock and Load"), TV (Rescue Me), film (The Ref and Recount--beware my GOP friends, I was not being diplomatic and yes, I realize Scalia is a brilliant man but he did come off as a dick in the film with the "irreparable harm" argument), and other Rescue Me related essays (other actors' careers). I also have essays on other posts, and unlike fans of Grey's Anatomy, who seem not to have lives or jobs and simply stay on GA FB all day long writing posts (some 1000 total in the last few years), RM fans are taciturn. So, it's sort of like VO Discussions , not DL discussions.
Apropos of this, I have never figured out the way public pages work on FB. Within 15 seconds of posting an essay (you always know which ones are mine, as the titles are long, with colons, and resemble literary-criticism essays in journals), it would say on the wall, "Denis Leary responded to X... on Discussions." This seems to be an automatic feature because back when Gilmore Girls still had a page, which mysteriously disappeared with no warning, causing me to lose all my essays sadly, the same thing happened. It did not, however, happen on the GA board and I have about 10 essays on that, including a few which are comparative analyses of these superficially different but fundamentally similar TV dramas (in my view one of the three best dramas of this decade, hands down).
But there was never a comment by his staffer. I don't think he writes all of the FB/Twitter one-liners. And I absolutely do not think he even reads his FB page. Adam Ferrara, on the other hand, the wonderful comedian, star of Top Gear (a funny show about cars on History Channel, amusing even if you don't care at all about cars), and actor on Rescue Me (Needles Nelson), does comment and "like" comments on his page. Of course, even after Top Gear, he had about 6K friends/fans, where DL has 60K. Vin Diesel has a bewilderingly high number: a million or so! He's so handsome (I love that muscular, masculine shaved head thing, provided the man has a decent face and normally shaped head), and he has an endearing manner in The Pacifier with Lauren Graham, Lorelai, the mom on Gilmore Girls, and now star of Parenthood, opposite the brilliant and handsome (and multi-lingual son of English teacher) Peter Krause, formerly Casey McCall on Aaron Sorkin's Sports Night (1998-2000).
But this woman knew nothing. And I was not the blabbermouth I usually am, giving away all kinds of clues. I told her nothing. I was wearing my favorite charcoal grey Nike sweatpants, a big blue fleece sweatshirt I stole from J (boyfriend) early on, the brown cashmere/wool blend Giulana Teso overcoat originally 800 I got for 50 , used, on ebay, and an FDNY hat. My hair was messy and I wore no makeup, just my normal jewelry.
She was eerily perceptive about my personality, passions, and past. She knew I'd had a bitch of a decade, talked about my intellect and my intellectual proclivities with great accuracy. She knew I had had a bad decade in the love arena. She knew that 2010 was the best year in 15 yrs or so and that 2011 would be even better. She said she felt I would finish dissertation but not for a few years and that I had wasted potential, though she put it much more nicely. She just said I had a powerful mind and loved to write, to express my thoughts with others, and that I had yet to achieve whatever success (not financial) I would one day have in life. She said I needed to remain focused on the intellectual pursuits in life--the "work of my life" is how she put it as I remember--and talked about emotional pain of the past with great precision. (She is enormous , just enormous and wasn't all that nice when I explained my banking problem, and just said, not wanting to chat clearly, "Come back when you've figured this out." But she was nice that day and I am sure when she has her 25 bucks in cash, she will be nice again. Oh, she does not take public transportation in NYC, as she feels "overwhelmed" by the stimuli on subway, in particular. Quite honestly, as my mother pointed out, for a woman of this size, a subway seat would not be terribly comfortable.)
I was on FB then, of course, as this was just three months ago and we did not discuss FB. But a lot has happened: Xmas and New Years with J, the Gregg Hilton thing, new books I had not even heard of then. And another phenomenal trip which is hard to see winding down on this glorious early spring day in NYC.
And I am so grateful for the support of FB friends who have complimented the setup of the blog (not my doing, entirely J's accomplishment), and said encouraging things about what is to come! And I had my brie and tomato omelette at Mon Petit Cafe, so life is perfect. No day which begins with brie and cherry tomatoes, and a baguette with sweet butter and French strawberry jam, plus juice and coffee can be anything but sublime!
I would love to take class and I will on Monday for sure, but today I will just revel in the beautiful jazz that Francis, the most wonderful New York , gay Broadway dancer-type , plays from the Master Class CDs.
Friday, March 18, 2011
My First Blog Posting! From an Apartment on 62nd and Lexington (NYC)
My dear boyfriend set this up for me. In about 5.5 months, I have some 320 essays on Facebook notes. He has been telling me for a long time to set the blog up but being technologically backward, I resisted for a long time. My notes break down (approximately) as follows: 60% pop culture, 15% high culture, 15% memoir/autobiographical and lifestyle writing.
I've been in the city now seven days and came down to the third floor of the building where I stay at the apartment of a dear , old family friend who has always been so loving and supportive to me. I feel truly blessed to have a fabulous place to stay in the city whenever I scrounge up the money for a ticket on Jetblue, about every 2 to 3 months.
I live in Santa Barbara with my boyfriend most nights, though I maintain a separate residence. I also stay with my parents in West Los Angeles about 8 days a month in two to three day intervals because my father, while fit and active and mentally sharp, is 86 and cannot see well enough to drive. I am "schlepper number one" (Dad is Jewish and "schlep" is Yiddish for drive/take). I am enormously close to my parents, though there were many years of estrangement, and speak to them each separately on a daily basis, when in SB. I "kibbutz" with Dad, a larger-than-life personality who flew B-24s in WWII over Germany, before going to USC Law School on the GI bill. He retired his bar membership after 50 years in practice. My mother still works in a high profile government position (law not politics).
I would like to finish my dissertation some day: "Ethical Fictions: George Eliot and the Narration of Life." At the moment, I do not have a chair and am six months of full time reading away from being able to write the next chapter of this philosophy/literature (ethics /aesthetics) dissertation which explores Eliot's roots both in British Romanticism (Wordsworth in particular) and German Idealism (Kantian aesthetics primarily). It's a monster dissertation and on the tail end takes up the way in which Eliot's fiction anticipates the moral fiction of Henry James, as conceived by the cottage industry of James scholars in the 1980s, beginning with Martha Nussbaum, Cora Diamond and Richard Wollheim. My greatest debt, however, in the final chapter of the project was to Robert Pippin's groundbreaking book, Henry James and Modern Moral Life (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
It would be superfluous to list my favorite films, TV shows, albums and books, as these are listed (not that many books, very hard to list books for an ABD girl whose life has been literature, and then in college, philosophy to some degree). My FB profile is public, though the wall and most photos are private. When I get back to CA, my boyfriend will teach me how to transfer the essays I wish to have on my blog from FB notes. About half of those notes are currently public. I'm not politically correct and my favorite comedian is Denis Leary, and my language reflects both of these facts. I'm also 100% secular, but have vast numbers of conservative , religious friends on FB. (I even got defriended by a great guy who was going out of his mind reading posts and comments by Tea Party people.)
Finally, my life has become significantly more public in the last few months, due to a very kind, extremely conservative GOP person, formerly in Bush White House, a blogger and serious presence on FB: Gregg Hilton. Between his two pages , which are an interesting mix of public policy/political discussions and what he calls "The American Scene" (this includes celebrity news/pop culture but little or no analysis of aesthetic objects, that is film, TV, music), he has 7.5K friends. He posted a joke about me, saying I was a "rare Ivy liberal" with tact, intelligence, and a sense of humor, who should replace Obama's Social Secretary. Gregg is a funny man with an appreciation of female beauty and a highly aesthetic sensibility and he did not pick a conservative photograph (a knee-length red Cosabella piece, not a dress, but it might have been one, rather than a negligee). It has, quite honestly, been a whirlwind which has brought highly educated, mostly conservative friends in my life, with whom I disagree politically on almost everything, but agree on almost everything culturally and personally in life.
Gregg is an extraordinary man, with deep sincerity and integrity, though I confess I do not understand his enthusiasm for and allegiance to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But he is a very good person, at once religious (Christian) and ethical.
I have not asked Gregg if he consciously borrowed "The American Scene," from the very important non-fiction work by Henry James of the same title. The "AS," as Pippin refers to it, belongs to the genre of travel writing. But it truly is a profound work of anthropology as well as cultural/social criticism, with some political implications, but this is not the predominant valence along which the text functions.
In the blog, I will continue to observe the percentage breakdowns I enumerate above. But I also hope to write some about the depression which prevented from having the career as an English professor that pretty much everyone expected me to have from high school on. I'm content and I enjoy tutoring and am blessed not to have to worry about paying the rent. But I am blessed. The part of not being in graduate school , or being a professor, that pains me the most is not having a circle of truly intellectual people around me, i.e. professors of English and philosophy with whom I can discuss ideas for hours on end. But I do have some very well-read new friends on FB, many of whom have doctorates. I truly am grateful for FB for connecting me to such people, because I have no affiliations anymore with UCSB (one dear professor who is very busy and a mother of two teen boys), and in SB, there simply is no opportunity to meet real intellectuals, or, for that matter, high powered lawyers or finance people (though as you will all see, I am NOT enamored of the finance industry)!
Doctors tend to associate with doctors and quite frankly, I've never really related to doctors. My best friend in college is a doctor in Oregon and I love and miss her but she's a new mother and extremely busy. Doctors in SB are also all married and they tend also, in their rare free time, to be with their families. It's just not like a real city where there are single professionals of a certain level.
Of course, you also don't meet talented actors, writers, directors in SB. There are plenty of rich actors or movie stars with homes in Montecito, but they are established older people who wanted a great house by the beach, not working, everyday talented people who may never make it at all, let alone make it big. There is, then , an absence at once of intellectuals, professionals, and talented/creative types which for many years thrust me into a profound and crippling depression.
It was not all the fault of SB. I hated the English department at UCSB, or at least the graduate students. I had very few friends and no dates. I loved some of my professors, profoundly, but the department is 80% "CS"--Cultural Studies--and coming from Yale, I was interested in language-based criticism, not just deconstruction, but close reading. While I am a liberal in politics (and an ultra-liberal on social issues like gay rights and abortion), I am a conservative in the cultural domain. I like history and politics but I don't want to mix my literature (particularly my field, the 19th-century) with them. Thus, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (and obviously Marxist anything, ugh) hold zero appeal for me. (In Renaissance Studies and also the 18th-century, these approaches do have a place, not the Marxist tripe, but the other two influential critical movements, due to the highly public, political, and social nature of the literature of those periods.)
I am not interested in the relation between literature and race, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, economics and the other disciplines that have invaded and overtaken English departments in the last 20 years or so. This is not to say I don't enjoy reading the work of others on occasion who practice this sort of criticism, but I have zero interest in writing anything on these issues. I am in love with philosophy and wish I had graduated from college in four rather than three years so I could have double majored in English and philosophy in the Golden Age of philosophy , at least one of them, at Yale (early 1990s). I actually care about the category of "the literary," a passe notion in most departments today (some are even worse than UCSB, for instance Duke). I care about ethics, aesthetics, language itself. I am highly invested in notions of mind and consciousness more particularly. I love both poetry and fiction, and poetry has become a smaller and smaller part of English departments, sadly, since so many courses focus on texts after 1800. Yale had four pre-1800 requirements when I was there, which translates essentially into four poetry courses, after the famous 2 semester 125, Major British Poets (Chaucer, Spenser, Donne, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Yeats/Bishop/Eliot/Stevens--one of these).
I am truly happy now, but SB is SB and I am so grateful I get to spend time in LA and NYC, as I really am both an LA girl and an East Coaster. I recently attended a dinner party with my wonderful boyfriend and met a tremendous woman my age with little boys, 1.5 and 6. I wrote to Gregg that I'm sure if you are married with kids, and can meet other great and smart women at school, you can develop a group of engaging friends. But for a single woman in SB "of a certain age," it's just extremely difficult.
I've been in the city now seven days and came down to the third floor of the building where I stay at the apartment of a dear , old family friend who has always been so loving and supportive to me. I feel truly blessed to have a fabulous place to stay in the city whenever I scrounge up the money for a ticket on Jetblue, about every 2 to 3 months.
I live in Santa Barbara with my boyfriend most nights, though I maintain a separate residence. I also stay with my parents in West Los Angeles about 8 days a month in two to three day intervals because my father, while fit and active and mentally sharp, is 86 and cannot see well enough to drive. I am "schlepper number one" (Dad is Jewish and "schlep" is Yiddish for drive/take). I am enormously close to my parents, though there were many years of estrangement, and speak to them each separately on a daily basis, when in SB. I "kibbutz" with Dad, a larger-than-life personality who flew B-24s in WWII over Germany, before going to USC Law School on the GI bill. He retired his bar membership after 50 years in practice. My mother still works in a high profile government position (law not politics).
I would like to finish my dissertation some day: "Ethical Fictions: George Eliot and the Narration of Life." At the moment, I do not have a chair and am six months of full time reading away from being able to write the next chapter of this philosophy/literature (ethics /aesthetics) dissertation which explores Eliot's roots both in British Romanticism (Wordsworth in particular) and German Idealism (Kantian aesthetics primarily). It's a monster dissertation and on the tail end takes up the way in which Eliot's fiction anticipates the moral fiction of Henry James, as conceived by the cottage industry of James scholars in the 1980s, beginning with Martha Nussbaum, Cora Diamond and Richard Wollheim. My greatest debt, however, in the final chapter of the project was to Robert Pippin's groundbreaking book, Henry James and Modern Moral Life (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
It would be superfluous to list my favorite films, TV shows, albums and books, as these are listed (not that many books, very hard to list books for an ABD girl whose life has been literature, and then in college, philosophy to some degree). My FB profile is public, though the wall and most photos are private. When I get back to CA, my boyfriend will teach me how to transfer the essays I wish to have on my blog from FB notes. About half of those notes are currently public. I'm not politically correct and my favorite comedian is Denis Leary, and my language reflects both of these facts. I'm also 100% secular, but have vast numbers of conservative , religious friends on FB. (I even got defriended by a great guy who was going out of his mind reading posts and comments by Tea Party people.)
Finally, my life has become significantly more public in the last few months, due to a very kind, extremely conservative GOP person, formerly in Bush White House, a blogger and serious presence on FB: Gregg Hilton. Between his two pages , which are an interesting mix of public policy/political discussions and what he calls "The American Scene" (this includes celebrity news/pop culture but little or no analysis of aesthetic objects, that is film, TV, music), he has 7.5K friends. He posted a joke about me, saying I was a "rare Ivy liberal" with tact, intelligence, and a sense of humor, who should replace Obama's Social Secretary. Gregg is a funny man with an appreciation of female beauty and a highly aesthetic sensibility and he did not pick a conservative photograph (a knee-length red Cosabella piece, not a dress, but it might have been one, rather than a negligee). It has, quite honestly, been a whirlwind which has brought highly educated, mostly conservative friends in my life, with whom I disagree politically on almost everything, but agree on almost everything culturally and personally in life.
Gregg is an extraordinary man, with deep sincerity and integrity, though I confess I do not understand his enthusiasm for and allegiance to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But he is a very good person, at once religious (Christian) and ethical.
I have not asked Gregg if he consciously borrowed "The American Scene," from the very important non-fiction work by Henry James of the same title. The "AS," as Pippin refers to it, belongs to the genre of travel writing. But it truly is a profound work of anthropology as well as cultural/social criticism, with some political implications, but this is not the predominant valence along which the text functions.
In the blog, I will continue to observe the percentage breakdowns I enumerate above. But I also hope to write some about the depression which prevented from having the career as an English professor that pretty much everyone expected me to have from high school on. I'm content and I enjoy tutoring and am blessed not to have to worry about paying the rent. But I am blessed. The part of not being in graduate school , or being a professor, that pains me the most is not having a circle of truly intellectual people around me, i.e. professors of English and philosophy with whom I can discuss ideas for hours on end. But I do have some very well-read new friends on FB, many of whom have doctorates. I truly am grateful for FB for connecting me to such people, because I have no affiliations anymore with UCSB (one dear professor who is very busy and a mother of two teen boys), and in SB, there simply is no opportunity to meet real intellectuals, or, for that matter, high powered lawyers or finance people (though as you will all see, I am NOT enamored of the finance industry)!
Doctors tend to associate with doctors and quite frankly, I've never really related to doctors. My best friend in college is a doctor in Oregon and I love and miss her but she's a new mother and extremely busy. Doctors in SB are also all married and they tend also, in their rare free time, to be with their families. It's just not like a real city where there are single professionals of a certain level.
Of course, you also don't meet talented actors, writers, directors in SB. There are plenty of rich actors or movie stars with homes in Montecito, but they are established older people who wanted a great house by the beach, not working, everyday talented people who may never make it at all, let alone make it big. There is, then , an absence at once of intellectuals, professionals, and talented/creative types which for many years thrust me into a profound and crippling depression.
It was not all the fault of SB. I hated the English department at UCSB, or at least the graduate students. I had very few friends and no dates. I loved some of my professors, profoundly, but the department is 80% "CS"--Cultural Studies--and coming from Yale, I was interested in language-based criticism, not just deconstruction, but close reading. While I am a liberal in politics (and an ultra-liberal on social issues like gay rights and abortion), I am a conservative in the cultural domain. I like history and politics but I don't want to mix my literature (particularly my field, the 19th-century) with them. Thus, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (and obviously Marxist anything, ugh) hold zero appeal for me. (In Renaissance Studies and also the 18th-century, these approaches do have a place, not the Marxist tripe, but the other two influential critical movements, due to the highly public, political, and social nature of the literature of those periods.)
I am not interested in the relation between literature and race, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, economics and the other disciplines that have invaded and overtaken English departments in the last 20 years or so. This is not to say I don't enjoy reading the work of others on occasion who practice this sort of criticism, but I have zero interest in writing anything on these issues. I am in love with philosophy and wish I had graduated from college in four rather than three years so I could have double majored in English and philosophy in the Golden Age of philosophy , at least one of them, at Yale (early 1990s). I actually care about the category of "the literary," a passe notion in most departments today (some are even worse than UCSB, for instance Duke). I care about ethics, aesthetics, language itself. I am highly invested in notions of mind and consciousness more particularly. I love both poetry and fiction, and poetry has become a smaller and smaller part of English departments, sadly, since so many courses focus on texts after 1800. Yale had four pre-1800 requirements when I was there, which translates essentially into four poetry courses, after the famous 2 semester 125, Major British Poets (Chaucer, Spenser, Donne, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Yeats/Bishop/Eliot/Stevens--one of these).
I am truly happy now, but SB is SB and I am so grateful I get to spend time in LA and NYC, as I really am both an LA girl and an East Coaster. I recently attended a dinner party with my wonderful boyfriend and met a tremendous woman my age with little boys, 1.5 and 6. I wrote to Gregg that I'm sure if you are married with kids, and can meet other great and smart women at school, you can develop a group of engaging friends. But for a single woman in SB "of a certain age," it's just extremely difficult.
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