burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

Smith's performance of the Verdi Requiem was the night of the day the Pope died.
Requiem=rest, and yet it contains so many "dies irae" (day of judgment, lots of wrath). Most beautiful part of the whole thing, lots of percussion and all, but still weird.
I really liked the Sanctus&Benedictus. And the Responsory, though when it ended [i was following along in the program] and then there was more i was confused.

I had forgotten that because this is the Sunday after Easter, First Churches' service focused a lot on the Resurrection etc.

Besides the Pope and Terri Schiavo, Frank Perdue and Fred Korematsu also died this week.

The Bible-Art-Culture symposium was largely underwhelming (to my mind) but Amy-Jill Levine was amazing (as akronohten had said she is).

A lot of the talk about Donfried talked about him doing a lot for ecumenical relations, which came as a total surprise to me. I mean, he's Mr. "Paul the Jew," but who knew he was Lutheran? I distinctly remember him making some remark about Lutherans, because i remember thinking "What is it with the religion department and Lutherans?" because he and Joel both said something within the space of a week about "Catholics and Lutherans," as if Lutheran=Protestant. Not that people don't make cracks about the groups they belong to, i just totally thought he [Donfried] was Catholic.

( 5 panels )

I did a large alcohol run Saturday night. It occurred to me that i get approximately 20% - like a waitress; you pay for your food and you also pay the person who brings it to you.

Ruhi proved that she gives good hickeys. ("Joygasm" was Alana's word.) I heart my friends who don't need to get drunk (not that my friends who do drink aren't entertaining when drunk).

I went to the "Confessions of a Sex-Crazed Mind" lecture on Saturday and the "Sexology 101" workshop and "Intimate Q&A" on Sunday, though i didn't go to the Sunday night Best Lesbian Erotica (10th edition) reading.

Tristan reminded me of Ms. Fisher, though less pale and skeletal, and her hair's highlighted. (She also reminded me of Tammy Bruce.) She was dressed so conservatively, which was also disconcerting. Dark stiletto pumps, dark slacks, reddish purple lacy velour tank, dark blazer, choker and pendant necklace, hair past shoulder length, oval glasses. Second day she had a pinstriped blouse.

( notes and highlights )

Stuff i forgot to mention from Friday:
-Emma and Cat tied Felicia up with duct tape. That was possibly the best part of the day. (Though multiple hours with Cate was pretty hot.)
-Laura came to tea and the first words out of my mouth were "What the fuck did you do to your hair?" because she'd gotten it cut very short. I actually liked it better when she was all femmed up for the mocktail that night, which i don't understand. I'm pretty much fine with it now, though. (I actually wanna get my hair cut pretty short, but in a femmey way. In that copious free time i have, right? And i'm thinking of going bra&camisole shopping as well. Maybe this coming Friday.)
-Music to have sex by was also a topic of conversation during the mocktail.

So, finishing The French Lieutenant's Woman at work on Monday was going to mean i got to sleep Monday night, but of course i caught up on LJ instead. And i was gonna make a Blackboard post, but it just didn't happen. I was like, "Sarah is crazy. Yes no maybe. Discuss." Yeah, it was bad.

I have MAT class during the Telling and Retelling film screening, which given my loathing of adaptations troubles me little. However, everyone seems to have hated the FLW movie, which makes me wanna watch it. I'm impressed with myself that i got the book read, but i kinda wish i could have read it more slowly, gotten more of the details. And dude, most obscure slash ever. (Thursday's presentation was on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. I have geek love.)

Oh, way to go online ordering. I picked up 12 books at the p.o. on Tuesday. [It makes me sad that one of them has an inscription dated 2001 of "Happy 19th Anniversary! Forever Yours"] I also have a shiny new (gold) check card.

I jumped into the commentary on Napoleon Dynamite in offbalance's journal, and was afraid it would go badly, but really i should have known better. As it turned out, the discussion enabled us both to better articulate our problems with the film and we turned out to actually be in agreement on a lot of things. And lo there was much rejoicing.

Conversation in wisdomeagle's journal about (un)popular fannish [Whedonverse] opinions was also good.

Imbolc, though not Groundhogs Day, makes it onto the Smith College Academic Planner for February 2. 6 weeks, what? I always forget that that's the long one. I live in New England, people. 6 weeks only brings us to the "official" end of winter, but New England winter often lasts beyond that.

Surprised by Joy got finished Tuesday night after all. Le bore. And, um, spiritual autobiography? Way more of a regular autobiography than one might have expected/hoped for. Plus, it makes me rather dislike Lewis, whom i had so wanted to like. And the ending? Dude, wtf? ::rages::

Class began with more of "Surprised by Joy: The Movie" (my title) which was worth watching only for the footage of Oxford (focus was on University, Keble, and Magdalen). Mostly i worked on rereading the last 2 chapters of Surprised by Joy to see if i'd missed something in the Conversion Narrative of Crap.

Then CZ did the usual (which Ruhi, listening to me at lunch, dubbed "call and response"). She asked us for items which contributed to Lewis' conversion and wrote each one on the board and talked about it for a few minutes before calling on the next person. There was one time a student said something and she disagreed and i was reminded of Lewis' talk about his father hearing what he thought you said and anyway i agreed with the student and wanted to discuss further but she called on someone else and we moved along.

She wondered aloud about how professors of Western Literature do it, how one can try to give a balance when Christianity so dominates amongs the big deal writers. This gave me an entry point to talk to her after class. I said that it's taught (and understood by many students) as a powerful narrative informing the works of these writers, so you learn a lot about the Christian narratives but it's not like you're being preached to. In contrast to how Lewis talks about always feeling like he has to keep the Christianity in the works of his beloved authors at bay. Yeah, Lewis is kind of psycho. He talks about Christianity pursuing him -- which is why i was surprised by a student mentioning him talking about free choice in his conversion. Yes, i said all that, and then i talked about how i was really frustrated about how the whole book he talks in great detail about everything and how it affected his spiritual growth and everything and then at the end it's basically "And then I converted. The end," and i was frustrated particularly because i'd heard about how he's so legalistic in his defense of Christianity and how he's written so many works of nonfiction with rational arguments for Christianity but the end of Surprised by Joy is such a cop-out and i was so angry. I think i ranted for a good solid 10 minutes. And i could feel the tears in my eyes -- because i had been so furious when i finished the previous night, and i hadn't had any opportunity to properly vent (3 handwritten pages in my reader response journal before i quit, but that didn't have quite the calming effect that actually talking to someone would have). She was glad that someone had such a "fiery" reaction to the book. Oh, and i politely mentioned my dislike for the fact that we have spent so much classtime that could be used for discussion instead watching a video that doesn't tell us much new. And after all this we chatted a bit about the stuff i wanna do in grad school, about stories that get told and retold. So yeah, i felt better.

I was also comforted by an e-mail she sent to the class later that night:

Subject: surprised by the ending of SURPRISED BY JOY?

Dear Inklings,

Thanks for a great class, and for the fascinating entries on Blackboard.

I had an interesting conversation with two Inklings members after class, who said they found the ending of Surprised by Joy a major letdown. After describing in such detail his childhood intimations of joy, his schoolboy pursuits and travails, his atheism and flirtation with the occult, and even his journey to theism, Lewis reveals very little about his grounds for belief in the Christian gospel. He takes us to threshold and drops us there. Why does he clam up at this point?

Also - Why does he speak of being pursued by the Christian God? (even here, one senses a literary imagination at work -- recalling Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven")

Come to think of it, while he has his reader's attention, why doesn't he try to make a convincing case for Christianity? What is the real aim of this book?

I'd like to hear others' views on this during the first ten or fifteen minutes of class Monday.
We'll also have a chance to return to some of these questions when we read Mere Christianity.

And from a later e-mail

Monday February 7
FIRST TWENTY OR THIRTY MINUTES:
Discuss the last two chapters of SURPRISED BY JOY ("Checkmate" and "The Beginning"). We'll pay special attention to the three "moves" in the chess match which Lewis says brought him to Theism. And we'll consider the way his narrative changes (becoming more suggestive and even cryptic) once he begins to describe the move from Theism to Christian belief.
REST OF CLASS:
We'll begin our discussion of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Please read the first nine chapters for Monday.

Weds. Feb 9
We'll continue discussion of LWW. Please read the rest of the book for Wednesday.

You will notice, I'm sure, the connection between the Socratic Professor Kirke in LWW and Lewis's tutor Kirk (Kirkpatrick, or the Great Knock). ("What DO they teach them in school?")

We got our presentation assignments and not only am i doing mine on my own (she had been talking about pairs, which some of them are) but mine is on "C. S. Lewis' Latin correspondence with the Catholic priest Don Giovanni Calabria." How perfect. (And other presentations include The Screwtape Letters, The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis' debate with Elizabeth Anscombe, and Tolkien in popular culture.) I think i'm doing my Lewis paper on C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot, and my Tolkien paper on Arthurian legend in LotR.

Me on Wednesday's dessert: "It's good but not great. I mean, it's just puff pastry with vanilla ice cream and Hershey's syrup."
Cat: "You make it sound so vulgar."
Kate: "You make everything sound vulgar, Elizabeth. It's your gift."

I missed RCFOS (if there was any this week) for

Robert Rosenblum, professor of fine arts, New York University, will present "The Art of Reincarnation: Picasso and Old-Master Portraiture," the second annual Dulcy B. Miller Lecture in Art and Art History on Wednesday, February 2, at 7 p.m. in Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall. The talk will offer a survey of Picasso’s life-long interest in portraiture and the particular ways in which he resurrects portraits from the annals of art history—works by El Greco, Velazquez, Goya, Ingres, Delacroix, and Manet—and transforms them into the friends, wives and mistresses of his own life.

Quite good, though sadly i was dozing off by the end (sleep-deprived in a dimly lit room...). Listening to Suzannah's introduction, i found myself wishing i had taken art history classes classes, so that i would have more narratives to draw on. And almost immediately in his talk, Rosenblum used the terms "quotations" and "paraphrase," and later on he talked about "translating into one's own language." Most of the artists he talked about (Old Masters i hadn't previously heard of, or contemporaries of Picasso also positioning themselves in an Old Masters tradition) had foreign names i couldn't quite transliterate, so i can't do much of a bullet list.
My favorite bit was that Picasso's "Weeping Woman" is often associated with his Guernica for obvious reasons, but it also draws on imagery of Our Lady of Sorrows, and later there's a sketch of Jacqueline Rocque which very clearly combines the two.
Other notes:
There's a painting of Jacqueline as Manet's Spanish dancer Lola (which also says interesting things about inserting people into nationalistic traditions).
This Picasso self-portrait is like Cezanne. Apparently he often did a painting in homage to an Old Master when one died. There's one that so echoes Gaugin's Spirit of Death Watching.
His portrait of Gertrude Stein was similar to some portraits of hulky men of state, and apparently Picasso joked a lot about her lesbianism and so she's usurping the male throne so to speak.
He also has a woman in an amchair and a woman with her finger on her temple (there are a bunch of these, actually) that echo somebody else -- tthe Ang (sp?) guy Rosenblum talked a lot about, i think.

The article (Robert A. Georges and Michael Owen Jones, Chapter 3, "Survival, Continuity, Revival, and Historical Source, from Folkloristics, 1995, pp. 59-89) we read for this week's seminar was largely rather lame. Example: The article begins with talk about ballads drawing on folklore, which we're going to spend some class sessions on later in the semester and which i'm actually interested in, but stuff like Animals can speak in ballads, notes [Evelyn Kendrick] Wells [in The Ballad Tree], a "vestige of" tometimistic belief in a kinship between them and human beings makes me wanna hit things.

We also read Jan Brunvand's The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings, a book on urban legends as folklore. One of the discussion questions was

Does Brunvand's research and analysis of urban legends dissuade you from whatever truth you thought/think the tales contain(ed)? Do you believe that the legends grow out of documented or real incidents (for example the Mouse in the Coke and "Alligators in Sewers") or rather (as the author demonstrates so many times) have no discernable origins that we can detect? Do we care whether or not urban legends have a basis in reality, choosing to believe or enjoy them out of a "morbid curiosity" to "satisfy our sensation-seeking minds"? Is that truly the appeal behind the legends?

I am far too factually minded. I feel uncomfortable saying "I've heard..." or "Someone told me..." about anything, always feel the compulsion to fact-check it (though i don't always actually do so). And honestly, most urban legends don't interest me. Either they're obviously fictitious scary stories to be told over campfires or at sleepovers or they just sound like unfactchecked news items (e.g. finding a dead animal in one's food).

Simply becoming aware of this modern folklore which we all possess to some degree is a revelation in itself, but going beyond this to compare the tales, isolate their consistent themes, and relate them to the rest of the culture can yield rich insights into the state of our current civilization.
-page 2

That's the only aspect of urban legends that really interests me.

Legends can survive in our culture as living narrative folk lore if they contain three essential elements: a strong basic story-appeal, a foundation in actual belief, and a meaningful message or "moral."
-page 10

First, it is simply traditional to listen to and to appreciate a good story without undue questioning of its premises. Second, "belief" in an item of folklore is not of the same kind as believing the earth is round or that gravity exists. A "true story: is first and foremost a story, not an axiom of science. And third, the legends fulfill needs of warning (don't park!), explanations (what may happen to those who do), and rationalization (you can't really expect sensational bargains not to have strings attached); these needs transcend any need to know the absolute truth., The appeal and durability of a superb morbid mystery tale is as strong in folklore as in fiction or film, and the significance of a "folk" telling of such events can be as great for a scholar as its appearance in a popular-culture medium or its literature.
-on why urban legends don't get debunked (page 22)

A lot of the book was psychosexual explanations of urban legends, which i'm not a huge fan of, but it was food for thought anyway. (The less psychosexual explanations tended to be the rather commonsense ones that one doesn't need to read a book to think of.) And it was neat to learn that some urban legends have antecedents from ages back (the spider in the hairdo story for example; page 78: a 13th century tale of a woman vain of her hair upon whom the devil descended in the form of a spider).

As if the life history of this legend is not baffling enough, consider that there is a prototypical "Vanishing Hitchhiker" story (not the true ancestor of our legend) in the New Testament in which the Apostle Philip baptizes an Ethiopian who picks him up in a chariot, then disappears (see Acts 8:26-39).
-page 39

::loves:: (And it doesn't hurt that that's one urban legend i'm actually rather fond of.)

The Tatar radio interview started out as a review of stuff i knew, but there was some new stuff as well, so it wasn't a total waste of my hour. She talked about how a lot of the boys are simpletons and a lot of the girls are go-getters, and how various cultures have cinder-lad stories and Germany might well have had them. She said that in the Grimms tales there's always the child as survivor while HCA's are so tragic -- like The Little Match Girl, and she says it's important in a child story that child hero survive. She said that reading fairy tales is a way back into childhood for adults and way to mature for children. She said that good bedtime stories are exciting, and that that's one of her new projects (the sort of tension between the fact that you're reading kids this stuff to get them ready to sleep and the fact that stories they're gonna like are typically gonna be exciting), the other one being "wonder" in children's lit -- Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. They talked about stuff the whole family reads, with Tatar mentioning Harry Potter, Lenson saying he ran out of gas when they passed 700 pages and mentioning Lord of the Rings from his childhood and Tara mentioning Narnia. Minutes before the end of the broadcast Lenson mentioned fanfiction!!! He asked Tatar if she had heard of it and she had not. He said that readers of stuff like Harry Potter, "They decide they wish they'd written it. And so they do." They write novels, he said. He said he'd never heard of it until one of my students [he's a Comp-Lit professor at UMass Amherst] proposed writing a senior honors thesis on fanfiction. (From his tone, it sounded like he denied said student, but of course i e-mailed him.) Those who say literacy and writing is on the way out are wrong, he said, and Tatar agreed and mentioned book clubs. And at the close of the broadcast, he he encouraged the listeners to buy her new book from your local 'independent, co-dependent, or chemically dependent, but not regular dependent bookstore.'

I luff my daddy. He told the story of a new teacher at NHS mentioning, "My passport says I'm male." and then says, And I almost said, totally seriously, "Did you used to be?" (she's short and "feminine-looking" but she had a number of years between college and starting teaching at NHS so who knows what happened then?) But I didn't, cause I figured she might not take it in the spirit I meant.

And there's an out lesbian at my high school? I'm impressed.

More from my dad:

• Perhaps I just notice unusual things, but in last night's State of the Union address, Bush seemed to be going out of his way to justify his foreign policy on the basis that it helped women. Perhaps someone on the writing staff had read this.
  
• outside the box thinking - well, outside most people's conceptual boxes

---

ats_nolimits 6.10: Girls' Night Out by ladycat777 and mpoetess
The title alone is enough to hook me (which isn't to imply that i don't read every episode anyway) and having read, i approve. Muchly.

Oh, and reccing fic reminds me that i got my website up on February 1 and didn't do a grand pimp because my inner perfectionist is cringing, but i suppose i really should put it out there. Me and the Text. Fics and recs and nothing political that you haven't seen before (assuming you've been here before). I have much love for the setup of Doyle's recs page, but i'm not sure i have the patience to go through and do mine that way. Or the time, really. I know my non-fandom time would be better spent writing feedback and recs blurbs than recoding a huge chunk of my website. Maybe it can be a summer project.

Oh, and amproof wants a rec of your favorite fic of your own.

Eowyn and Theoden vid to Tori Amos' "Winter" by wolfling and mogigraphia
I barely remember the story from the book, but i think the vid is the synopsized version, and anyway it made me cry (not like that's difficult to do).

One ficathon i'm not signing up for but whose concept i enjoy: The Gay (and Lesbian and Het) Sex Challenge
You get dealt 3 playing cards with sex positions on them and write a fic using one of those positions.

doyle_sb4 is an evil enabler. *looks at stagesoflove and 30_kisses* Though i think i'll just bookmark them for the ideas rather than actually signing up.

Who's done that "10 Things You Want to See More of in Fic" thing? I've seen 4 lists so far (doyle_sb4, jennyo, musesfool, fabu) and am culling from these and working on my own list. It's not like i don't have enough fic to work on, but i like the ideas (plus the idea of getting to point someone to a fic and say "See, it includes on of your ten" gives me a happy).

We’ve been learning interesting things about “The Waste Land” in Michael’s class, though i’m not really in love with the poem. Sean-from-Hampshire brought in a CD that superimposed a recording of T.S. Eliot reading “The Waste Land” over the bassline of an Eminem tribute to Dr. Dre. Yeah, that was a fun way to begin a Thursday morning :)

Michael made the midterm optional so you can either do 3 short papers or 2 papers and the midterm. I am very excited about this.

Having both seen “Shells” (Angel 5.16), Allie and i discussed death and finality over lunch. This topic deserves its own post at some point.

Betsey said our final paper is gonna be tracing a single fairy tale; i am very excited about this.

Got my UMass paper back. Various “good”s and such like, and then

Elizabeth - Isabel is an intriguing subject and she makes perceptive comments. Your accompanying analysis is also insightful and is well-rooted in the context of the assigned readings. I enjoyed reading this.

Full marks, woot.

I had just read the “May 18: Final paper due by 5pm” bit on the syllabus for my UMass class, but reading it again i saw in another section: “The final paper will be given in the form of a take-home essay exam.” I already knew i was gonna be doing next to nothing once Smith ended (the last 2 meetings of my UMass class are like make-believe classes) but now it looks like i'll have even more free time, as i don't expect the exam to take me more than a day. Maybe i’ll finally get to see some valley_slash people again. I will also finally have time to do some clothes shopping (though i may get some done over Spring Break).

As part of class, we get shown stuff in the media, about romance, body image, fairy tale imagery in advertising, corporal punishment, and, most recently, the evils of Disney. A good chunk of class on Thursday was a film called “Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti” which was all about how horribly the Disney Corporation treats its workers in Haiti. Sometimes i feel like i’m in a Smith class with the issue tangents the profs do in that class.

Went to the Mommy Myth reading Thursday night. Sat with Heather and co-liaison Jaimie. Jay was the one who introduced Meredith Michaels, and he talked about how she has published really interesting things about identity and such, but you wouldn’t know from her talk that it was co-sponsored by the philosophy department as there was nothing about philosophy in her readings.

The subtitle of her book is “The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women,” and that encapsulates what the entertaining reading from her introduction talked about, but it wasn’t anything i hadn’t already heard before. She also read from part of a chapter about welfare and the stigmatization thereof, but again, nothing new to me. (One interesting thing was how “mom” has become a positive term -- e.g. soccer mom, stay-at-home-mom -- but “mother” has become a negative term -- e.g. welfare mother, unwed mother.)

One of the best bits came when she was introducing her talk. She and co-author Susan Douglas were raising daughters at the same time. Meredith refused to allow Barbies into her house. Susan, in contrast, had a house littered with Barbies because her daughter demanded them and she trusted kid her kid to not be brainwashed by Barbie, being raised in a feminist household. I thought that was a really interesting idea, how much do we trust our kids, or anyone really, to not be brainwashed by society? This of course gets us back to one of my constant gripes, that anyone in politics or activism [and certainly i do it myself] has that condescending “We know The Way, The Light, and The Truth, but you are confused, uneducated, brainwashed, misinformed, evil, whatever, so we don’t trust you to make decisions for yourself and will make them for you.” My personal issue with buying Barbies for kids is that i can’t stomach financially supporting the company.

One of the last questions came from a 10-year-old boy who had this long question involving “paternal unit.” My parents and i joke about parental units, maternal and paternal, but it’s faux-pretension or whatever. I didn’t actually follow the entire question, but clearly it involved something about fathers, and there was definitely nothing about fathers in her answer. The more Q&As i go to, the more cynical i get about people not actually answering questions. Sure you might be throwing out quality information, but if it’s not the information requested, shove it.

dykotomy summed it up well:

what did everyone think about this lecture? i was not so impressed, although the presenter/author was humorous. it seems pretty obvious that motherhood is stressful and difficult and women may feel burdened by not being the perfect mom that we are conditioned to expect them to be. and racism/classism clearly make these pressures of motherhood far more difficult and cause some mothers to be judged in a demeaning/dehumanizing manner.

i didnt get what the proposed solution might be- more relaxed expectations of mothers? increased responsibilities for other family members in raising children? social supports?

I considered skipping out early to go see Mona Lisa Smile (Rec Council movie) with susiebabylon but didn’t.

I forget what i said, but something prompted “That’s why there need to be more Elizabeth [surname]s in the world.” Also: “When you’re a gov professor, I’m gonna come and ask you about the war in Iraq and gay marriage and you’ll say ‘Bitch, it’s been legal for 20 years‘ and I’ll say, “Yes, but tell me how they relate.’ ” Clearly i need to become a gov professor just so this can happen :)

Hella nice reception, though i couldn’t partake of the wine (4 months and change...). I had tons of fruit and cheese and did a little helping with chairs.

9:30-ish we left and i walked back with her to Chapin and then we chatted in Chapin dining room for quite a while. Quoting from her LJ: "And then it somehow got to be 2:30. Goddammit, if a girl is going to stay until 2:30, why can't it be that kind of girl? Nothing personal."

Went to All’s Well That Ends Well at Umass on Friday. Saw Adam there. Why do Josh and Adam spend more time with Kate than i do? [We all met on the Oxford trip, and Kate and i go to Smith while they both go to UMass.] Didn’t wait the 20 minutes (which turned into 30, making the wait 5 minutes longer than the ride) for the bus with me because he is not a super sweetheart; sigh. He seemed to actually enjoy chatting with me (i hate when i can’t tell if people are just being nice) and i have his phone number now, so hopefully after Spring Break we can get together sometime.

( play spoilers )

Saturday night, Emma and i went to see Cabaret at Hampshire.

Amusingly, Sam (my friend at Hampshire) was gonna be in Northampton that night seeing some friends play at a bar. I had a map and directions from her, not to mention a good 45 minutes to kill, so we figured we’d be fine. Thankfully, neither of us minded all the walking we did that evening trying to find Prescott Tavern. Emma’s friend Lilah goes to Hampshire, so she joked that maybe if she yelled “Lilah!” she would come and take us there. It turned out that we had in fact walked through the complex where the Tavern is, 2 or 3 times, we had just thought it couldn’t be the right place as it looked like it was all residential buildings. But we got there in time to still have our ticket reservations honored, so all was good.

Director’s note:

Getting this production of CABARET to become a reality has been a long process. Two years ago I first set out to do this project, but quickly realized that with 7 classes it was impossible to also produce a fill-fledged musical. When the time came to figure out what to do for my Division III project, I knew that CABARET was what I wanted to do. In my Division II work, I explored questions of sexuality, and how these issues -- homosexuality, sex, gender stereotypes, HIV/Aids, prostitution, abortion -- were reflected in musical theater. Several questions I posed to myself through the process were: how can sexuality be portrayed through performance? How does theater use sexuality to entertain? What makes a work “risqué?” When CABARET first opened on Broadway in 1966, the production was considered daring dangerous, and risqué. By today’s standards the 1966 original was tame. The script was revised in 1987, giving each of the characters more depth, allowing each character to embrace his or her own sexuality.

Damn, i really should get in touch with the director, ‘cause i’m really fascinated by so much of that.

( spoilers )

We hung out in the Tavern until they started to close down, as we had ages to wait for our bus. While waiting at the bus stop, someone called “Emma!” ‘Twas Lilah :) She was on her way somewhere, but was cool to bump into her.

Quote of the night Sunday: from Liz Liedel at Tangent: My preferred pronoun is “The student.”
*g* Okay, background: Check-in usually involves stating your preferred pronouns if you want, and last year the SGA (Student Government Association) replaced all “she/her” language in its constitution to variations on “the student,” a move which is currently up for revote, and Liz is the SGA President.

We had a lot of interesting discussion about trans people at Smith and what the purpose of Smith is and suchlike. I forget if Tangent has one of those safe space policies about not attaching people’s names to stuff when repeating ideas brought up at meetings, so i’ll just use initials. And clearly this isn’t the sum total of every argument there is, or even of everything that was brought up tonight.

LC said that he thought of Smith as being a place for people who have/do suffer gender discrimination, and that if he thought it was a women-only space he would leave, which i thought was interesting, and certainly more consistent than some positions i have heard.

Talking about the revote, LF said that people have said stuff like “What if someone identifies as an alien, or a rabbit, or whatever, should we change the language for them?” and her feeling is that the SGA is about representing Smith students, and regardless of however else you identify, if you are a Smith student, you are a student. We agreed that the language isn’t particularly empowering, but it doesn’t disempower anyone either, and not everything at Smith has to be explicitly about empowerment. R jokingly asked if we should coalition-build with SSFFS re: alien-identified students.

S talked about men upsetting the dynamic in classes, whether they are trans- or bio-men, and that of course that already exists as 5-College kids can and do take classes here, but it’s something that needs to be taken into consideration when we think about this issue. Hmm. I don’t like Robby all that much, but i don’t think he “upsets the dynamic” of the class i have with him any more than anyone else who has comments i find annoying does. I have had few males, trans or no in my classes, but there are plenty of overpowering women in classes (isn’t that what Smith is about?) and honestly, if i were a man in a Smith class, esp. anything WST-ish, i would feel intimidated, ‘cause you’re hella outnumbered.

Do i skip Lenten book study for the trans-feminism panel [Mon. Mar. 22, 7:30, Neilson Browsing Room]? I’ll already have missed one for Spring Break, and the following week we aren’t meeting but are going to the Julian of Norwich talk at HHHC.

Senate debates the potential SGA constitution revote the next night. Who are my Senators, anyway? I”ll be attending, but i should talk to my Senators as well.

Rec Council movie this week is Gothika. I’m going to Cloud 9 at Hampshire on Thursday. Am still undecided as to whether i’ll go to the movie on Tuesday.

Oh, and it’s this Monday, not last Monday, that Philadelphia is showing at Wright, 8pm, my mistake.

Oh, and there's a lunchtime talk (CC 103, noon) about queer rights in Israel this Monday (today) because clearly there isn't enough going on in my life this week.

Gillian says we’re gonna have a standing date for me to come over and have tea at her Friedman next year. This makes me happy. I don’t see people often enough..

There will be a post about Spring Break plans later this week.

Now i need to go to bed. Wanna meet with Randy before class because i really don’t understand how i’m supposed to do some of this problem set given what we have learned so far.