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Wednesday, August 24, 2011

News of the World

I turned forty-six today. I turned in the last of my grades yesterday, my three rather exhausting summer intensives are complete. I've got a week off before Fall courses resume, which means shepherding another MA Thesis cohort through their research and writing process at SFAI and teaching an undergraduate course "Technoscience and Environmental Justice," both of which should be rewarding and neither of which should prove too taxing (especially when compared to the crazy intensity of this summer). I'm going to spend a while completely indulging myself, reading Colleen McCullough's phone-book sized potboilers set in the Roman Republic while lingering in hot baths and also watching Luchino Visconti's movies on DVD in chronological order. My blogging preoccupations -- daily news and futurological views -- are both being particularly ludicrous at the moment, so it remains to be seen if I'll blog much in the lazy days ahead.

9 comments:

laura said...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! I hope you have a magical day full of kittens and sunshine!

Birney said...

Make sure you're the First Man in Rome and not The October Horse, okay?

Lorraine said...

Best of luck with your MA cohort. BTW, I'm also of the 1965 birth cohort. I'm curious: Do you self-identify with the tail end of Generation Jones or the leading edge of Generation X? Or do you, like most people, see the media concept of generation as BS? Just curious. BTW, my captcha for the present comment is "facch".

Dale Carrico said...

Intellectually, I do think this generation blahblah business seems rather like marketing BS -- but it is hard to deny that profiles of GenXers do tend to get quite a bit right about me. From what I know about Gen Jones -- doesn't that refer to "keeping up with the Joneses?" -- I think I revile them.

Dale Carrico said...

Laura! Look at you! How are you?

Dale Carrico said...

So, Birney, if I keep reading these things (I'm on my third one, and I've got a pile of something like four more at the foot of the couch) am I going to continue to enjoy them?

Birney said...

Yes, but maybe you'll want to stop after the October Horse and not bother with Antony and Cleopatra. Or, better yet, read the Shakespeare of it. As the books go on they tend to compress more and more history together and characters stop being interesting humans and more like pawns being moved by what we all know happened. Queerly, tracking that trend sorta seems to appeal to me now. Damn you rhetoric department!!!

Josephine Michelle Draus said...

Both senses of the word (name?)…keeping up with the Joneses, and also Jonesing for a joint. Broadly speaking, the 1970's were the Jonesers' teenage years. After the sex revolution, before AIDS. Like Gen X, characterized by adulthood-as-rude-awakening, stagflation and the rest of the post-OPEC reality in their case; in our case the (IMHO harder hitting) total reorganization of the below-professional-status workforce as a contingent (part time and or temp) workforce.

Lorraine said...

Both senses of the word (name?)…keeping up with the Joneses, and also Jonesing for a joint. Broadly speaking, the 1970's were the Jonesers' teenage years. After the sex revolution, before AIDS. Like Gen X, characterized by adulthood-as-rude-awakening, stagflation and the rest of the post-OPEC reality in their case; in our case the (IMHO harder hitting) total reorganization of the below-professional-status workforce as a contingent (part time and or temp) workforce.