… and I feel fine.
“The Worst Tribute to a Great Poet”
“Many bad poets have paid tribute to the greats of their profession, usually in appropriately atrocious verse. Shelley is the victim in thie lines below.”
from English Poets
by James McIntyreShelley
We have scarcely time to tell thee
Of the strange and gifted Shelley,
Kind hearted man, but ill-fated,
So youthful drowned and cremated.
This was all taken from the volume Very Bad Poetry … perhaps available at a bookstore near you.
Glory Season
It’s not just a (rather good) David Brin novel. I am toward the end of season 5 of Buffy (am on episode 16 now. Back when season 6 aired they recapped the end of season 5 (after all, Buffy dies, then comes back, blah blah blah), and sometime later I caught a Glory episode or two in syndication.
Strange Brew
On the way back from picking up some pita bread and chocolate milk from the co-op I stopped at Star Liquor to see if they had that tasty Smoking Loon in stock; Mike, Sherie and I enjoyed a bottle last Monday. Alas, they were not carrying any, so I settled for beer; they have Moose Drool in the fridge, so I got a six-pack.
The Year in …
TV: Alias came to an end; at some point I watched Blue Gender (freaky 26 episode anime); I dropped out of the Veronica Mars and 4400 watching crowd; I finished the first season of the new Doctor Who but haven’t started the second; I continued with two Stargates, Lost and Battlestar Galactica, and added Heroes into the mix; I’ve acquired some Good Eats, America’s Test Kitchen, etc.; I fell behind on Bleach; I was compared to Tim Gunn; Eureka was amusing; I started watching Buffy from the beginning.
Comics: Y – The Last Man … great read; Girls … continued pop-pulp sci-fi gender-politics goodness; the whole Marvel “Civil War” thing? … too drawn out; Alan Moore’s rather naughty Lost Girls hit the stands.
Books: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was the best “long read” of the bunch; Special Topics in Calamity Physics, with all its excessive MLA style parenthetical references and such, was the most amusing and simply entertaining read of the year; House of Leaves, which I haven’t yet finished, is the most complexly entertaining ongoing read of the year.
Movies: It was not a great year for sequels (M:I 3, X-Men 3, The Grudge 2 … all disappointments); it was a good year for “B” movies (a Bond flick, Borat, and Babel all quite good); in the realm of foreign cinema I continue to recommend the recent “Das Leben der Anderen” (The Life of Others); strange Japanese movie fun continued with (the not quite new) Visitor Q.
Music: The Transsylvanians (especially the song Sukar from the album Igen … available on iTunes); Gogol Bordello (see the album Gypsy Punks); the Hungarian Roma group Besh o droM (not to be confused with my other favorite Roma ensemble, Ando Drom); the joys of Vienna Teng’s voice accompanied by cello, viola, etc. … see the song Blue Caravan for evidence; Eurovision winners Lordi from Finland …Hard Rock Hallelujah is an Alice Cooper + KISS + Orcs + Klingons evangelical zombie cheerleader anthem.
Final Thoughts
I traveled too little, even if thousands of miles between Berlin and Boise were involved. While in Berlin I took few day trips and such, with Hamburg (accompanied by Jyoti and Corina) the only highlight (Potsdam doesn’t count). Once back in Madison I managed a weekend getaway to Chicago as part of a trip to the Moritz conference. 2007 offers the possibility of a 10 year reunion in SoCal and, if I’m lucky, a job somewhere other than the upper midwest.
Berlin and Madison provided opportunities to meet some new people, one or two of which have remained in my life, some too little, and returning to Madison allowed me to reconnect with some old friends.
I think that much of the weight I lost in 2004 has returned due to sloppy eating habits and should be a focus of 2007. I no longer need Latin since my main Baumgarten text has received a complete German translation, but I’m still interested in returning to that and other languages early this year. While I wrote too little I still made significant dissertation progress, especially through the discovery of new texts and avenues for argumentation. In 2006 I had my creative moments, expressed mostly by mid-year doodling, and augmented recently by weekend writing gatherings with friends, but the output was nowhere near what I managed in 2001, when I produced enough to put together a small book.
2006 was a year for small things, lots of dabbling, not passions, although I once or twice thought it might be different. The winter and spring are for finishing the dissertation and finding a job; if my lecturer position works out I’ll add teaching to the mix and manage to keep my insurance. I’ve been burned too much attempting to be social, but I hope Dissertator Burrito Tuesdays can continue. I do need a break from academic endeavors.
