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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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Cage and chance
The first week's people and places: Tdh is like a big bear; one of those men who take their size in stride, perhaps sheepishly growing larger through the years all while remaining shyly sexy. Glasses, a beard, khakis, long-sleeved button-down shirts, tall, dark, handsome (Tdh). Is rumored to become very excited when speaking about archaea. Seems very approachable. Doc, of course, hyper as always. Loud, brash, fast, aggressive in front of the class�although this seems to simmer down to tactic when you speak to him in person. He seems then not to be so much aggressive as to be using aggressive to avoid real contact (the way I have been accused of using banter). Moves very fast, speaks even faster, rarely wears anything but shorts and t-shirts that proclaim his love of caffeine and soccer. He is rare among professors in not being afraid to say, "I don't know," when he doesn't know. Tuck is very tall and thin, with a longish Friar Tuck haircut, a deep "waa-waa" quality to his voice; I've never seen him in anything but slacks, a button down shirt and a tie, although he's taken to wearing "less serious" ties (Disney stuff, and the like, which only seems to serve to underscore his sad attempts at whimsy. Who believes in the whimsical nature of Disney? Everyone should have long realized that Disney is a corporation. When you market whimsy, it automatically loses whatever made it whimsical to begin with.) He tries very hard to be personable�and succeeds�in front of the classroom, but in person, there is a very distracted aspect to his interactions. I like him very much, if only because he tries exceedingly hard to make what is often a difficult and unavoidable subject an easy and approachable subject. He said to me on the first morning of class, "You seem very familiar." Sophistica showing me the existence of clean, well-lit, non-scary basement bathrooms in the dreaded lecture hall. She exclaims: "I saw a bunch of people coming down her, so I followed them!" Feldenkrais class last night: Afterwards, felt relaxed, could laugh more easily, felt squared away. During, felt aware inside my body, wasn't worried, didn't try to push movement, was amazed at how the instructor knew what was happening in my body. This a.m. before beginning his lecture, my molecular cell professor asked everyone with tape recorders to turn them off, and then proceeded to tell us about the evaluations that he had received in which some students had threatened him and badmouthed other students in the class (since this is a two semester class, we are all relatively familiar with each other's faces). Apparently, a student was suspended last semester because he had threatened a professor (who matched up his handwriting on the evaluation to an exam he had taken). It made me feel very sad and upset to hear him tell us these things. I felt like crying for a moment, thought I was going to have to leave the room. Examined the words and music of John Cage in my "Postmodernisms" class. I've had only very limited exposure to Cage's work, but my professor gave us a bit of background information which greatly increased my enjoyment of his music. We watched a documentary made by Peter Greenaway about Cage, in which Cage reads short (all one minute long, regardless of content) pieces as a voice-over over his musical compositions. One piece was about an Eskimo woman who was asked is she would, given five hundred dollars, accompany a corpse to the U.S. She agreed. Once in the U.S., she noticed that people would go into a train station and she would never see them again. Upon investigation, she also noticed that people entered, spoke a few words to the man in a box, and then boarded a train. She got in line, repeated what the man ahead of her had said, and went to that place. She did this repeatedly until she was running low on money, so she decided that the next place she came to, she would settle down and live there for the rest of her life. She happened, on the day she came to this decision, to be in a small town in Wisconsin on a day when no one was traveling. So she went to the man in the box and asked him where he would go if he were going on that day. He told her, and she went to a small town in Ohio where she still lives to this day. This story reminded me of Francis Crick's role in the discovery of the structure of DNA.
More lies:
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