coldhearted scientist وداد

This music video could be good to use in class. I must teach Spanish literature from 1700 to 2010 soon, a topic about which I do not know enough to create a non-stiff survey. I usually teach it with a set of representative texts. I survive it, but I am not truly current in this field. I am conversant enough in it to be useful on a thesis or dissertation committee, but not well rounded enough to teach a fully informed junior level survey.

I have thought of teaching this course as an undergraduate seminar on García Lorca. If we studied his complete works, which could perhaps be done in a semester, we would necessarily learn of other writers. We could project large images upon the wall and imagine ourselves to be in a modern painting or an Andalusian village. Each student could be assigned to give a presentation on one of Lorca’s friends, or predecessors (including writers from before 1700), or his descendants.

Alternatively I could also turn this survey into a course on the Civil War, very broadly understood (culture and society before, and during, and afterwards, and contemporary repercussions). I think we would learn a great deal and that the course, sacrificing traditional “coverage,” would be more interesting and would in fact cover a great deal. Many others must be teaching courses on a concept resembling this one, and they would surely help me.

Now I should really not be thinking of this at all since my out of field creativity must, for practical reasons, go into strategies for teaching even further out of my field. This is why I am so frustrated. I tend to feel I should have found by now a practical way to handle the breadth of what my career and job, which are not well harmonized, require.

The problem is that the needed scope for teaching is very broad and that I am competent in it (a lesser degree of competence would, paradoxically enough, be a help), but that the scope of my own interests even for purposes of this job is similarly broad and lies largely elsewhere. I often feel I am putting off our real needs as well as my own. This can be excruciating, and that is not a mood — it is a situation requiring more than palliative care.

In another area of life, though, I recently melted down about painting, staining, and varnishing which I truly dislike and for which I truly have no talent. I have never done roofing but I have reason to believe I would not like that, either. Perhaps “I love to teach” means “I am glad not to be working completely outside any of my lines.” Perhaps love is sometimes this.

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The question of love is interesting and I should post on it. I have said many things about Reeducation but perhaps one important thing I have not said is that it appeared to believe in thinking and acting out of anger or resentment and not love, a principle which seemed immature then and that I think was. Dealing with that idea was perhaps the hardest thing about Reeducation, and the right to shake oneself clear of it only came into view for me recently.

Perspectives like love and wonder so easily transcend the modern theories that difficulties are due to spiritual problems, or chemical imbalances, or insufficient levels of resignation and self-abnegation that it is hard not to laugh. And I would like to say that the conundrums I have about what to put first at work, or which compromises to make, are not moral failings but just practical problems that may not have fully satisfactory solutions.

Objectively I feel this is true but I hesitate to say so because it would be self indulgent, according to some malformed theories I once tried to make work right. I have been too much overextended for too long. This comes from having taken lessons on adaptation that were not actually meant for me, and from having learned that an overdeveloped sense of duty was one’s only shield from hard rain. I have tested these theories, however, and they are malformed.

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This post is over a month old; as often happens, I had too many and scheduled some ahead, for when I might have none. I would have written a new one today instead, but WordPress went down and I Tweeted and Facebooked the fragments I would have fashioned into a rather fascinating Post.

The exhibit I actually went to was in the former Palace of Communications, a marvelous late 19th century building actually constructed in 1904. There was a wonderful piece in this exhibit, a cartoon from 1900, in which an indigenous individual makes an offering of “patriotism” to the stela “Porfiriopoxtli” by blowing smoke at it — while sacrificial victims such as the Yaqui Nation lie in their coffins.

The museum’s permanent holdings are very beautiful (it is the National Museum of Art, established 1982) and I will return. Now, however, one is drinking green tea, continuing to read Rayuela, and waiting for the World Cup to start, which it will do soon. The referee of Mexico’s first game is Ravshan Irmatov, an Uzbek.

Axé.