cyclics

Last day of class, tomorrow.  And my reward? A shitload of papers, followed by a shitload of finals, on Tuesday.  If I handle it right (i.e. punish/reward myself sufficiently), I should have it all cleared off my desk by this time next week, so I can abandon the paper I was working on today (*waves cheerily*) and turn to the one I haven't written (*waves warily*) before then turning back to the one I was working on, etc.  The turn around is brutal - a single week of spring break, and then the new quarter, and in that week the two talks and two classes to prepare.  Yes, of course it could be much much worse, and to the one of you who I know reads this with her 4-4 teaching load, yeah, poor little rich kid, etc., but hell, it's my blog and I'll whinge if I want to.  Last year I taught Fall and Winter, and had spring off - I went to England last April, to look at the books (and drink of the pints, if my increasingly saturated memory serves aright).  An email exchange with the friend who probably will never receive the letter, and a friendly reminder that her shit doesn't stink.  And a thought, unexpected, that if I stay here until they've decided they won't make me leave, I'm playing it safe.  Never been my strong suit, safe, even if it's been my weak point (if that makes any sense, and I think it does, if you know what I mean and I think you do).  Why not shove my head in the jaws of a hostile institution halfway through?  Although I should probably finish this book of mine, in that case, and get it out the door and perhaps a polite review or two.  Or, fuck it, burn the shit.  Admit that I have less control over my life as "successful" than I ever did whilst betwixt and between and in the cracks.  And reassert that control by redefining successful.  Or just admit that I'm annoyed I finished the Scotch.  "I'm out of Chivas," he said to a room full of construction workers, staggeringly slightly.  Not me, fools.  Him. To quote M., as N calls him, "Only to read childrens' books / only to love childish things, / throwing away adult things, / rising from saddest looks."

djhazzzz

May 28, 2007.  The last time I listened to Coltrane's Africa/Brass album.  199 times, I've listened to the opening track of Pat Metheny's "A Map of the World", morning music (yeah, still, Tone, and it's still your fault. I've eliminated the album from my "most played" playlists.) April 1, 2007, the last time I listened to Arvo Part's Berliner Messe.  I used to fall asleep with that album playing every night in the late spring and summer of 1994.  So much to read, so much to listen to, and I'm feeling burdened by the limitations of my work.  What should be intellectual freedom is instead the burden of a book unwritten, of promise yet to be fulfilled, the sword of Damocles dangling ominously, yet described in triplicate and its severance a process well documented and funded by the Great State of California.  I've somehow come to associate my not-listening-to-jazz (in favour of a wave of indie/shoegazing over the last few years) with not-being-done-with-my-book and not-being-more-productive.  I'm not sure why, as I've been stupidly productive, of late, despite the two unwritten talks in the next 5 1/2 weeks scaring the living fuck out of me.  The bigger audience, 1st week in April, likely the less important talk than the smaller-but-everyone-is-someone audience, 3rd week in April talk.  Sigh.  Back to Mrs. Mandlestam, having dabbled in some of Osip's poetry, this evening, and another fine glass of the fine invention of Glenmorangie  aged in Burgundy casks.  Delightful.  

ooops

"Now I'm where I want to be and who I want to be and doing what I always said I would and yet I feel I haven't won at all."  (Eb - E - E - Eb - E - E).  Or something.  I've got a bad case of the "oh shit" blues.

But, in better words than mine, "It is clear that, crushed as it was, my 'self' had survived and needed only a short breathing space to come into its own again - it is particularly active in old age when a certain peace of mind has been achieved, but before the pain of past years has died away.  Later, the pain too no doubt goes and gives way to senile complacency, but I have not reached this stage yet.  Then it will be too late to write - pain acts like a leaven for both word and thought, quickening your sense of reality and the true logic of this world.  Without pain you cannot distinguish the creative element that builds and sustains life from its opposite - the forces of death and destruction which are always for some reason very seductive, seeming at first sight to be logically plausible, and perhaps even irresistible.  I feel my pain keenly now, and am going to write about myself alone." --Nadezhda Mandelstam.