Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

Man, we’re falling apart near the end of things.  It’s the last two weeks of our last year of classes, and we’re a mess.  Sydney is stalked by a fever, easily overwhelmed after a semester of stress, and sleep-deprived.  My stomach is getting picky as it senses my rising stress levels, and I’m losing my powers to be decisive.  In trying to figure out my plan for tomorrow I wandered around the house listlessly for half an hour, unable to weigh my options fruitfully.  This is pretty sad!

Arwyn is helping us by jumping on us throughout the night, eating Sydney’s pepper plants, and leaping over us every time she spies a bird outside.  Mom’s suggestion of making Arwyn a cute rug is starting to look more appealing!

But there are times when Sydney and I look at each other and tease each other (he thinks I am babbling without any sense to my words, I think he’s getting a bit spineless and turning into a worrywart).  Let’s hope those moments carry us through the end of next week!

Erin

Here‘s a delightful article about ravens and their intelligence. My favourite two tidbits:

1) Ravens apparently think wolves stupid. Ravens take elaborate measures to deceive fellow ravens about what they’re up to when they’re spying, hiding food, and so forth. But when they’re spying on a wolf that is burying food, they watch him openly — and dig up the food as soon as he leaves.  Those dumb wolves that just can’t keep track of their food …

2) Especially courageous ravens wanting some excitement will grab boars by their tails and let themselves be towed along through the snow on their backs.

What’s not to love about playful elitists like that?

Sydney

I just finished typing up comments on my students’ first drafts of their final paper.  Eight-ish hours of reading drafts, at this point in the school year, makes me feel a bit kooky.  I think I’m going to sleep before trying any more major brain activity.  But doing a teaching-duty stretch like this ensures that I can wake up tomorrow to do my own work!  Yay!  By now I’m really ready to read a book!  I really don’t like having papers hanging over me, so I get them done as soon as possible, preferably all in one sitting, so that I can assess each student within the context of his peers’ papers.

But I’m going to go to sleep with “In the novel Persuasion, by Jane Austen, a major theme is . . .” in my head.  Here’s hoping I don’t have nightmares about a Jane Austen novel–that would be too sad for words!

Erin

but my brain is elsewhere.  Reading drafts and papers for my students, pushing through the grind of too-much-reading-each-week, and spending long days on campus is becoming ever-more difficult.  My whole self yearns to go outside, to take walks, to read things off to the side, to be creative, to spend time with friends.  If I can just make it until the end of classes, I might be able to fit in some fun before I turn to paper-writing.  I think I’ll have to, for sanity’s sake!

Erin

I had a great time on Saturday trying to figure out what exactly Augustine was up to in De duabus animabus. I’m not sure I succeeded, but the attempt was enjoyable all the same.

I also discovered that Burlington is a lovely town. I could stand to live there, especially if I managed to have a house loooking over Lake Champlain to the mountains behind.

Despite the fun, I also spent most of the weekend wishing I was outside enjoying the glorious weather. I was fortunate enough, however, to get home relatively early yesterday, so that I managed to sow radishes and to plant some onions and leeks in the afternoon. There are few things more pleasurable than getting some loam under my fingernails on a beautiful spring day.

But now it’s back to writing papers. Alas.

Sydney

Just a question: when you judge a work of art (books, movies, paintings, etc.), do the values that it promotes factor into whether you think it is a good or bad artwork? I’m not talking about a specific character (since often artists will include a terrible stereotype while, in the larger scheme, undermining it), but when you step back and look at the work as a whole, if it promotes an ethos that you object to, does that play a role in your judgment of it as “good art”?

Evaluations based in part on ethics used to be the norm in art criticism, but now the pendulum has swung entirely the other way: art has to do with aesthetic qualities, and generally any commentary it offers on our morality is incidental to its role as art. Just like I may get a sense for how to navigate the NY transit system from a book set in NYC, morals may be included in a work of art, but they need not be included in our evaluation of that work as art.

I was hoping to know what people outside the art critical world have to say about how they judge art. This has something to do with my aesthetics class, and also something to do with the Virginia Tech tragedy. I can’t help but remember that the kid was a senior English major, submitting work that incited alarm in his teachers and peers. Bless my fellow instructors, the ones who actually teach creative writing, because I know they occasionally have strange or alarming stuff come through their classroom, something that I thankfully don’t have to face.

But if the kid’s plays were well-written, would his instructors have been alarmed? Quite possibly, as it is the content that they mention repeatedly in their interviews. But if a major art critic caught sight of the plays, would he also think them frightening and worth calling the police, or would he have picked them up as the next big thing?

Erin

My cat is amazing. After a wonderful day yesterday, I settled in for a good night’s sleep and she insisted on pouncing on me all night. So I woke up a bit groggy and stiff, but ready to get on with things. Then I realized she had thrown up on the floor. I realize this happens with cats, but I’ve been brushing her every day to make sure she wasn’t swallowing hairballs–so much for that. And then, when I stepped into the living room, I saw she had trampled all over and eaten some of Sydney’s growing pepper plants. Ouch. So I’m still cleaning up dirt from our desk, since she insisted on walking all over Sydney’s stacks of papers with her dirty feet. *Sigh* What a great Sunday morning.

Erin

Erin’s dad urges her to demand paperwork and warranty info on the tires she’s just had put on the car.

Erin bursts into tears at the thought that she may have done something terrible to hurt the car and demonstrate her utter failure as an adult.  This is particularly jarring as it comes on the heels of recent organizational achievement in the attic and numerous loads of washed and folded laundry.

Dad realizes she’s somehow been overwhelmed and coaxes her back down to more moderate emotional levels, chalking it up to Sydney’s absence this weekend and the fact that she’s been among pussyfooting ninnies for a long time, rather than the straight-talking engineers of home.

Life resumes as normal.

Erin

I’ve gotten a ton of stuff done around the house and outside today. A quick trip to Target and small items that I’ve been needing to take care of for weeks are suddenly finished. Sydney asked me to plant some onions and leeks in small containers, so I spent a couple of hours outside with my fingers in dirt, plants in hand, and birds fluttering around me on the way to the recently-refilled feeder. When I looked up there were three male goldfinches perched just overhead! Goldfinches are my favorite bird, so I felt like I was getting the royal treatment today.

This gardening project was far removed from the kind of gardening Sydney will be getting me into later this month; that gardening involves a rather hefty fence system (you really shouldn’t need a post-hole digger and 2x4s to “garden”), long days of digging, and generally a lot of mud. Maybe if I could just garden sometime, rather than farm (which is what we seem to do in this house), I would have unmitigated happiness at the prospect of a summer of gardening. But for now I’ll try to hold onto thoughts of my leisurely gardening this afternoon, rather than my memories of some really rotten days last year, and see how far in the season that enthusiasm takes me!

Oh, and as a sidenote, I think I actually got a bit of a tan from my activities today. That should tell you how close to paper-white I must have been!

Erin

Driving home from teaching I saw lots of people out on the tennis courts, and I had a moment of longing.  But as both husband and housemate are gone, no tennis for me.  I’ve opened the windows in the house and now I think I’m going to go wash the car (gasp!). Dad, you should be proud!  And yes, now that there really seems to be no more snow coming, I’ve had the tires replaced – better late than never.

Erin