{"id":287,"date":"2007-02-19T22:24:01","date_gmt":"2007-02-20T04:24:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/?p=287"},"modified":"2012-11-09T20:16:18","modified_gmt":"2012-11-10T02:16:18","slug":"rosenmontag-in-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/2007\/02\/19\/rosenmontag-in-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Rosenmontag in review."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Heroes:<\/strong> Great episode. It gave Ted a new companion and created a team out of a few disgruntled types. I just rewatched the Kelly Macdonald (aka: hot schoolgirl from Trainspotting; reporter in Hitchhiker&#8217;s Guide to the Galaxy, etc.) episode of Alias (season 4), and so the Peter and Isaac confrontation-resolution reminds me of that. Watch it and you&#8217;ll know what I mean, not that the context is the same. It&#8217;s a common trope in any two-person fight that tangentially involves a third person.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>Baking:<\/strong> I made banana bread a few days ago and took the remaining loaf in with me today; it did its usual disappearing trick. I had been a bit worried because I think that was the load that started to experience a weird separation effect in the butter + eggs + sugar + buttermilk + bananas mixture; I figured that perhaps the bananas were too ripe and reacting curiously. The bread was fine, however.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Teaching:<\/strong> A good discussion day. Their essays are due Wednesday. Today I told them about Rosenmontag and we also read &#8220;Das Fenster-Theater&#8221; together and talked about it and related topics. After class I answered questions about narratology and periodization for Natallia; she&#8217;s also taking Venkat&#8217;s 221, which is the intro to literature, and they had to read Kafka&#8217;s &#8220;Die Verwandlung&#8221; (&#8220;The Metamorphosis&#8221;).<\/p>\n<p><strong>Books:<\/strong> I stopped by the library and picked up Jennifer Egan&#8217;s <em>The Keep<\/em>, which got good reviews last summer. She evidently developed a reputation as a <em>chick lit<\/em> author, which is, as one can imagine, a bit of a bad thing, for it&#8217;s a ghetto, and an ill-defined one at that. What are the boundaries of chick-lit? Who knows. It&#8217;s the same reason why Margaret Atwood does not like being called a sci-fi author even though half of her most well-known books are related to sci-fi, especially that of the post-apocalyptic dystopian variety. Once you&#8217;re placed in a genre-confine, you stay there, and chick-lit is merely the newest such genre. And yet I still use the word. I also picked up the Nicola Griffith edited <em>Bending the Landscape: Horror<\/em> (New York: Overlood Press, 2001), which I had checked out once before, but back then I only read the first story (&#8220;Coyote Love&#8221;), which turned my stomach with its blunt but not overly graphic depiction of self-muitilation. I need to read the rest. I also got <em>A Word Like Fire<\/em> by Dick Barnes (New York: Handsel, 2005), a posthumous poetry anthology by a Pomona English professor whom I knew only in passing while I was there. I saw his bizarre play &#8220;The Death of Buster Quinine&#8221; my freshman year and seeing the trailer to Julie Taymor&#8217;s &#8220;Across the Universe&#8221; reminded me of it. There is no information out there to be found. I was surprised that the UW-Madison library had the book on the shelf.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Coffee:<\/strong> After the library I stopped by Fair Trade and had a fritter and coffee, the former being a splurge given my need to lose weight, but I hadn&#8217;t eaten all day and needed sugar for my brain. That&#8217;s my rationalization, and Angela&#8217;s. Turns out she was there as well. It&#8217;s not a German department hang-out, per se, but quite a few of us show up there. I&#8217;ve seen Kris there, and Helena, and Mike as well, and I went there with Corina, her sister, and Juergen once. I wrote another diary and had Angela listen to the &#8220;Treuetest&#8221; from a Hamburg radio station. The guy has the radio call his girlfriend at work to see if she&#8217;s faithful by having the radio guy ask her out. It gets worse. It&#8217;s not that she says yes, it&#8217;s that she says &#8220;Sure, but it will cost you 250 Euros.&#8221; The girlfriend moonlights in a way the boyfriend did not suspect or expect, and she tears him a new one asking, &#8220;How do you think you got your BMW? How do we afford vacations to Mallorca?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Music:<\/strong> I&#8217;m still in the middle (tail end?) of Joe Satriani. The first album to which I listened (Engines of Creation, and perhaps Flying in a Blue Dream) was amazing. The guitar is always good, but the overall quality of the music depends on the genre or style a bit, and the plain guitar rock is the least satisfying musically. After Joe Satriani come the Johns: Coltrane, Denver, and Mellencamp.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tonight:<\/strong> I&#8217;m finishing up a bottle of Smoking Loon syrah (2004). I think of it as a pleasant wine to watch Heroes to, to read to, and to write to. I got some more comics today but haven&#8217;t read any. And so many library books. And a dissertation. I spoke with Sabine a bit and she asked if I wanted to be in the play this spring; I said yes, but told her of a weekend I&#8217;ll be gone, a week and a half before the performances. I have last night&#8217;s episode of Battlestar Galactica to watch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Heroes: Great episode. It gave Ted a new companion and created a team out of a few disgruntled types. I just rewatched the Kelly Macdonald (aka: hot schoolgirl from Trainspotting; reporter in Hitchhiker&#8217;s Guide to the Galaxy, etc.) episode of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/2007\/02\/19\/rosenmontag-in-review\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[112,96,107,150,168],"class_list":["post-287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-myspace","tag-baking","tag-coffee","tag-music","tag-teaching-2","tag-wine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}