Christmas in July

A side note before I get started. As I typed in the title of this blog, two other titles popped out, so it seems that I have a tendency to use Christmas in my titles. Lots and lots of entries with christmas references. Makes me wonder how that season seems to always inhabit my subconscious.

These days have been a blur. Still reeling from this great crisis concerning work, disaster seemingly averted. I'm not out of the woods yet, but people are reassuring me that the worst of it is over now.

I've been looking for things to brighten up about. One thing I think is this new project I've undertaken with Adam David. It's usually bad luck to talk about it or pre-empt things, I've seen since I started working for real that usually I give up on a lot of things I write; but if I say I'm writing something I feel this obligation to show people that I actually finished it. So if I announce I'm going to finish it, I somehow find the willpower to.

Again this new project I find very exciting. I won't claim to be a T.S. Eliot fanatic. In fact most of the stuff of his I've read I've gotten from various anthologies and collections. Still I consider Prufrock one of my favorite poems, and I really enjoy reading him. Enjoy so much that a couple years back I wrote that series of weird dramatic monologues in the vein of Prufrock. So the new project has us working with some of Eliot's poetry and kind of updating it. I think that the source material is so sublime, and the kind of interaction between text, old text, new writer, it's very experimental and makes a lot of room. Some will remember how Ricky de Ungria's Pidgin Levitations tried for this kind of reaction, with him revising, as an older man, poems that he had written in his early twenties. Now here we are engaging one of the greatest poems, and one of the greatest poets of all time. There's a measure of conceit here, for Adam and I to think of engaging Eliot in this way. And it seems very ambitious. But I haven't been writing anything else and this seems so large and challenging that I can't say no to it.

There's that, and in teaching I find myself always excited about teaching my advancement class. I'm having fun because I'm teaching what I want. Going genre based and mixing up TV, film, and literature, I think I'm plunging my students into a critical study of forms that will enrich their understanding. I like to think of things in terms of The Matrix where Neo sees the world as if it were normal, but as his consciousness of things is raised he starts to see the binary code, the structures that are in place, all of them underlying the seeming reality that surrounds them. I think that an understanding of forms allows you that kind of vision.

This brings us to the whole Christmas idea. This quarter so far all I've been able to get in is a detailed study of horror. This friday we watched The Descent. On my own, watching these films helps to pump the adrenaline and allow for some intellectual engagement. But watching with the class one remembers the joy of communal viewing. Just the screaming, the tension everyone suffers from, and the inevitable laughter at the reactions, which always has to seem a little uncomfortable.

So I'm thinking of other genres to jump into. And I think one of the most ignored genres in terms of criticism, is the action movie and the action story. Its popularity at the box office is almost inversely proportionate to its critical reception. But I grew up on action movies, and I love the good old gun fight and explosion. So I'm hoping I can find some way to get them into my class. In an effort to see what I can do with them, I've picked up two of what I consider to be genre defining films. The first installments of the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard franchises stand in my mind as landmarks in the develpoment of the action movie. These films ushered in a new kind of action movie during the 80s, each providing the prototype for two different strands of the genre. I can't specify here yet, since if i'll be teaching i'll be pre-empting, and according to the format i'm supposed to teach in I can't give it, I must elicit or something.

So I spent the first half of this day watching these two movies again and the funny thing is that they are both set during Christmas. For the first two Die Hard movies, the Christmas setting was well defined. They dropped it in the later two though. I still can't remember though if the second Lethal Weapon movie was set in the yuletide season.

I mention these things because as the different parts of my life fall in and out of place, there's this need I feel to do things that will make me feel like a child again. Many people have called me both child-like and childish, and they are probably right. But as the adult world and its responsibilities impinges on mine, I think I want to feel like a child again.

I mention this because when I was maybe ten we bought a new VCR because the old one had been broken. The new one stayed in the living room. The old one I took and tried repairing. I don't know how I did it, but I managed to fix it. Among the few videos we had at the time were the first two Die Hard movies. I watched these over and over. So seeing it again now brings that back. Other things that help bring back the child are my watching Transformers. The first time I watched as a critic, but the second viewing I watched as that child who cried when Optimus Prime died.

Lately I've wanted to go somewhere with a rollercoaster. As a kid I spent a lot of afternoons at Six Flags getting my brain shook in and out of place. I don't think there are any rollercoasters here that would provide that kind of extreme rush, but if anybody knows any that might up the adrenaline level, drop me a comment.