Trying On: The American Education

Early seven o’clock in the Hamptons. I fell asleep early, while we looked at old pictures of ourselves and jeered and alternately supported the latecoming spirit of Patriotismus für unserer Land that seems to strike us in this barren decade when we watch the Olympics. We were waiting for a train of Host’s friends to arrive from somewhere. I took a nap–as I always do–which involved a panic-struck observation that the clock really did give a six o’clock in the morning reading: I did not wake back up to greet the train.

I am abandoned in a sleeping house, and don’t feel comfortable using the pool, so I will tell the stories. After No dragged me back to the city, and after our divorced-couple battle involving the throwing of the paper sack (mine) and a defeatist attitude regarding my completion of said mythic journey to the Hamptons (No), we met with No’s love Malagasie and her sister Clip at Parsons-at-the-New-School. Clip had some sort of exhibition of work from a two-week portfolio-building class she had taken. Clip and Malagasie started neighing and rubbing necks and giving long horsen glances at No and I’s many bags and haphazard airport dress, so I volunteered to sit on the round, rolling, cushioned benches with the stuff while No and the sisters went to see Clip’s art. I ended up standing by the door to the exhibition of animation. Two sessions were running: Junior and Senior. Because I was wearing my Authoritarian Brown Dress, I happened to look like a docent; and, in my reduced, travel-anxious state, I took considerable pleasure out of managing the space in the tiny and overcramped showing room, by helping newcomers find spots, and by generally and fairly permanently occupying the space just in front of the hinges of the door. I was impressed by the quality of the flash animation videos that the students produced–one in particular involved a man with a head of garlic, and some sort of an emotional (anguish? conquest? love?) scene with bread and a subtly anthropomorphosized tomato. The Junior class, as far as I could tell, were responsible for storyboarding a character, and then completing a set of fundamental Flash tasks with the digitized sketch of said character. The basic tasks involved rotating, walking, the bounce-and-stretch (imagine what a Jigglypuff would do if dropped into a screen and allowed to accelerate towards screen’s bottom), the fly/run, and the morph. The morph demanded that students sketch by hand the intermediate stages between two objects, thus completing the illusion of a morph–Flash normally takes care of this process, so the results were fairly impressive. The most memorable (and the only that I remember) was the cat-breadloaf morph. The Senior class’s assignment involved these basics (which were gathered in one film, called “Experiments”) as well as a more sophisticated final project. The students were given a single uniting theme for their various expressions: a mouse must run into and out of the scene. The resulting film, despite the variety, possessed considerable contiguity. In one of the frequent anime-style mouse-fighting scenes, the tiny mouse rotated his slit-eyed head in a gesture of defiance against the flaming-haired anime warrior. The gesture was delightfully urban, and adequately communicated the come-hither sass required to initiate physical skirmishes on the modern-day anime battlefield. 

No and the sisters eventually came back, and No assumed his turn with the baggage. But, before I could resume my free wandering (exploding a can of seltzer in my face in the meantime), the sisters decided to take the subway back to Bushwick. They had originally approached No and I, stating that we seemed to have “free hands” (given our preponderance of baggage). This was not true, but No decided to remove some of his baggage to Malagasie’s apartment so that we could travel on to the Hamptons relatively unencumbered. This is how No abandoned me in a highly fashionable place just before the pouring rain came down over New York Town.

As No left, I wandered through I.D.’s 2008 annual design review–I was pleased to see the SquishyBowls from GuyotDesigns, among the great company of a reversible-squishy drain plug (it can be “popped up” for easy gathering of sink debris), Nike’s mock-vintage Portland Runner (produced to advertise the launch of the Nike vintage running shoe line), and a beach-chair back that sticks into the sand. 

Without No, I started to read the Critical Animal Studies articles that Bald Grad Student had uploaded for our Critical Theory Club back at Old University. I had never attended Critical Theory Club, but had eagerly requested and bookmarked all of the readings, since that first day when BGS flagged me outside of Sava and asked me about my (nonexistent, preemptive) dissertation. BGS has eagerly solicited my commentary before the 28 August meeting (in which Un chien andalou will also be viewed) so I thought that I would do my best to make good on old commitments by reading the texts. (However, I have just been reminded of “Ideology 101,” an online course through the Progressive Academy Online, through Young People For–I’ve let my work lapse since the first week! Goodness! How the moral sins do stack like chips of black against the sun!) Anyway: the first reading was John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals.” I will include, as a subsequent post, the complete content of my notes on the reading. BGS also included Thomas Nagel’s “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” (a piece on consciousness and the mind-body problem, as far as I can gather) and big sections of what looks to be Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal. After pushing my computer to 8% battery life, I ducked into a fashion show opening, and ate many little plates’ worth of olives, roasted red peppers, and strangely pungent pepperocinis. I then took up John Tytell’s Reading New York, which I purchased in hopes that it would inform my “Poetry of New York City” course. I only took it with me because of a promising tale of Tytell’s youthful deflowering at the hands of an older siren named Frauke (a masculinized and shell-feeling mouthful of a transformation of my own German professor’s name), which I found when flipping through the book several days ago. The read was terrible: several prominent sentences, indicating Tytell’s gross amplifications of common erroneous tropes or manners of thinking, marred what otherwise was a Noble Obtuse Narrative. Another post on the Noble Obtuse Narrative to follow. Just before the section on Melville (which I found quite useful–my mystical sentiments toward Melville, birthed by Professor Squabble at the Ohio State University, and encouraged by some side reading on Hawthorne in Maine, have been heighted), foil trays of hor d’oeuvres which might have been hot were marched past me to the fashion show wing. I followed soonafter, and found a tray of dosa-wrapped samosas next to a tray of spanikopita (inedible). After four of the samosas, I detected some meat-textured lumps in the otherwise delicious curried vegetable filling–in stark testimony to Critical Animal studies, I waved the suspicion away, and thanked heavens for the versatility of lentil texture. I went back for five (or six) more samosa, and waited out the rain, which had begun to pour over the huge flat glass-paneled ceiling of the waiting area of Parsons. More Tytell, and my fatigue grew, so I called No to make more plans. He said that I could come and nap in Bushwick, but I didn’t want to pay the fare (my newfound Recuerdo policy–see entry to follow), so I took more olives, more pages of Tytell, and eventually wandered back to Union Square for a round of farewell falafel.

We met our host, and Vincent, the driver, took us all the way to the Princess Diner in the Hamptons, where he called and got directions to the house that I now sit in. I am still not burning where I am–at least not with anything other than hunger. I am excited about two things: about the Watson Fellowship proposal in world theatrical practices and rituals that Our Host has been describing to me (and the potential that I have, in the next year, to develop a similar specified and diversified grasp on What It Is That I Would Like To Do With the Rest of My Life), and–goodness, I’d almost forgotten the other–the Balkan brass band that apparently exists at Swarthmore. I will need to find an appropriately battered mellophone or marcheable horn before I leave Columbus. Towards breakfast and my darkening skin, with distended belly and yellow eyes, with skin in need of a brushing from above–

JLR