An hour class can easily be subsumed into negligibility in the right conditions - say if you pick up right where you left off in reading, as I did yesterday; the last few chapters of Samoa in the morning, then the preface and supplementaries after French, all quite amusing, including blanket excoriation, odd references to Nietzche ("obviously, Mead was not aware that Apollo and Dionysus actually depended on one another") and Tolstoy. Alyssa was still there and reading too, and I popped in an old scratchy cassette of Macy Gray's first album, which sounds terrific, and the Magnolia soundtrack on the other side. That took up only part of the occasionaly incongruous 1.75 hour gap in my schedule, so there was time for lunch too. HiCuCo was quite enjoyable, with a good two-hour discussion of the Mead that ended with an extended comparison of her ethnographic practices to trash-talk shows and RealiTV. Following the momentum of last week, I talked a lot, prompting Jocelyn to cite me in her notes and indicate lots of back-and-forth with Emily Allen, newly red(or maroon)-headed (several people with new dye jobs, what gives?). That class is developing a really nice energy, combining genuine scholarly intensity with lots of good-natured fooling around. Alex Adleman, with whom I spoke a while during the break, has taken to drawing little cartoons on the blackboard during break relevant to each week's subject. Matt Fitting gradually (in backwards installments) wrote "cumming of age in samoa" on the back blackboard, erased it immediately, then rewrote it much larger at the front of class. We discussed ways to convince Bruce to dye his hair. Part of this is that the class is half freshmen, and with a topic this heady and hardcore everyone feels some sort of group connection. Also Bruce is terrific. In the last half-hour of class, he gave us his capsule explanation of modern and postmodern, while I made a list of things to do over break:

read
eat
cook
sleep
shop
clean
write
compose
practice
camp
dance
walk
dine
attend
host
entertain
play
plan
prepare
watch
sort
drum
inhabit
imbibe

after a sunny-day confluence of post-playwriting people once again I walked back home for a scant two hours, enough time to make enough headway on work for the night (a presentation of a Platonic argument, some French something I'm sure, and an e-mailed party proposal because McCabe printers weren't working with me) that I decided to go to African I after all (I think) for more lamba. II was unusual and intense; for the first half we did a lot of the typical movements, but added turns to all of them (double turns to the hungway, which I even got once or twice - does anyone know how to spell that?), then he gave a fairly long speech about the future of the discipline, likening himself to our "ancestors," even though he only has about ten years on us. And the technique is only thirty years old, though he speaks of it like an ancient tradition in danger of dying out because of youngsters' lack of respect. We did some floor/stretchwork, of the sort that makes you realize that no matter how in shape you think you are, there are things that are still goddamn impossible to do without intense effort. It felt great afterwards though, and we wrapped up with fun lamba stuff that I had a pretty good handle on.

From there to SAC, where we funded remarkably little, happily enough, and I recreated my proposal on the blackboard - ended up with $275 out of $317 requested, which should be more than plenty, depending on what turns the party planning takes. Fragmented screw discussions, and I couldn't get a clear response to whether or not Ben and I would DJ - some vague discussion of asking freshman hip-hopper Derrick who did the SASS basement (but I'll get into all that later.) I decided to go to Pi (I can make the greek letter here, but when I post it turns into , unless by some chance you can read that as the letter), which is as pivotal as I remembered, if not as fresh-seeming. The characters are so archetypal, and the themes so majestic and grand, that the film manages to be both melodramatic and playful without sacrificing its core intrigue; it's hokey and thought-provoking at the same time. And reflecting on it the next day, I decided that it makes an effective confluence of the Platonic and Cartesian worldviews Alison was there so I sat with her, she hadn't known about the Jewish mystic elements. And still I was in bed relatively early, after belatedly remembering the Phil reading - turned out to be 5 whole pages of Descartes. But was that the night Alyssa was here and I kept thinking of more things to say as we were falling asleep, about the party and assorted thoughts, Edith Frost and the other Edith?

you're so easy to love
you make it hard for me
…
and it's hard
maybe impossible
as long as you're decided
i can't stay mad at you
…
as long as there's a sparkle of life in the ancient heavens
i will always love you like this

posted by K. Ross Hoffman at 8:43 PM