Fast away the old year passes

December 31, 2011

Here's how we celebrate the New Year en famille Sycoraxienne: D is with his family in NC, I'm with mine in DC, and we're watching the first season of Friday Night Lights again and weeping over Tim Riggins's emotional repression.  Seriously: it's one of the finest, deftest television series ever made, one of the canniest critiques and romances of American self-conception, and it makes me want to reread this enthralling oral history of the series:

"I want to build up this all-American quarterback, this hero. This wonderful, beautiful kid with his entire future ahead of him. His biggest decision in life was whether he was going to take a full ride to UT or Notre Dame. He's got the hot girlfriend. He's got the loving parents. And he's going to break his neck in the first game. We're going to create this iconic American hero, and we're going to demolish him."

Here's what strikes me about Friday Night Lights after several trips through it (it's endlessly rewatchable): this is a show that actually respects production and process.  This is a show that admires its set dressers and the work they do, that dwells on the details of costume and object to build a richly layered world of ironies and motivations, that gives its cameramen (and -women?) the freedom of improvisation and its actors the latitude to practice their craft with spontaneity and nuance.  Not to mention the fact that it presents masculinity as a state of emotional complexity and depth, teenagers as beings of tremendous and harried ethical responsibility, and marriage as a matter of negotiation and conflict, mistakes and respect.

So, FNL with the parents, champagne at ten, and then an evening of syllabus work and blogging.  That's how we send the year out chez Sycorax.  Bring it, 2012.

'Tis the season for social allegory

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Last night while sitting interminably on the tarmac in Baltimore after a terrifying aborted landing at foggy National Airport I came to know my fellow passengers quite well, a social microcosm à la John Ford's Stagecoach: a federal marshall, a man who organizes off-shore call centers, a soldier just returning from deployment in Afghanistan, a nice couple from Fredericton who were delighted to encounter another Maritimer, an enraged solipsist who kept belittling the staff for not letting him off in the middle of the runway, a flight attendant who sang "Twinkle twinkle little star to us" over the course of what was supposed to be a 20 minute flight from Philly and finally declared firmly, "We have to get to DC. I BELONG in DC."

As the hours wore on and we encountered diversion after diversion, mechanical failure after mechanical failure, I did think, "Wow, it's not a good sign that we are now explicitly discussing how we will divide up the labor when we have to form a new desert-island society in the style of LOST."


When we briefly deplaned in Baltimore, the enraged solipsist left our little band of brothers/proto-society in a cloud of luggage-oriented recrimination. But before he did, he got the number of the woman sitting next to him, who had been parroting his every gripe like Echo and Narcissus for the last three hours. "Should I give you my number or my email?" she asked anxiously. He shrugged, and began grinding his teeth in the general direction of the gate agent. "Which would you *like*?" she persisted. "Whatever," he replied, focusing his glare on a pilot who was emerging from the gate, "This is insane. UNACCEPTABLE!"

"Are you kidding me?" I thought, "Who picks up women while behaving like a tool? Who consents to be picked up in these circumstances? What about this experience made you think, Now THERE's a guy I want to spend more time with. Maybe even the rest of my life"?


Happy Solstice.  They're all getting longer from here.

On the Holy Family, Domestic Labor, and Losing One's Pants

Fragments from holidays with my nonna, who, at 91, is the most entertaining person I know.


Taking my grandparents home from Thanksgiving involves painstaking choreography to establish everyone safely in the car. "Watch your head, Watch your head, WATCH YOUR HEAD, ok, wow, very deftly handled," I say to my grandmother as she lowers herself into the passenger seat. "Yes," she replies, "but now I appear to be losing my pants." "That's just the sign of a successful Thanksgiving," I say confidently. We're nearly home by the time we stop laughing.


*     *     *


And my grandfather's no slouch in the hilarity department, although somewhat less intentionally than my nonna.  The other day, I got this report from my mother: 'Tried to explain Occupy Wall Street (Nova Scotia, DC, St. Paul's London, Oakland, Portland, etc. etc.) to my nonagenarian parents. Finally, my father said, "wait, was this during the Depression?".'


*     *     *


In this holiday season of creches and carols, I always think of my grandmother's quest to find a single painting of the Holy Family in any of the world's major galleries depicting Joseph engaged in domestic labor or, more pointedly, childcare. 


"Oh sure," she would say, "he'll do a bit of carpentry or tend the donkey. But meanwhile Mary's got her arms full of books and Jesus and sometimes John the Baptist for good measure. Do we ever see him change a diaper, read a story, or play with the baby?". 


She was indescribably delighted when she finally found a late Renaissance image of Joseph making what appeared to be an omelet.


*     *     *


This recalls to me some summertime tales of my grandmother that I don't believe I ever told here. It all started with brunch at Great Falls with my grandparents. A drink arrives for me. 

Grandmother: "What *is* that?" [She's having a mimosa.] "Did you order it?" 

Me: "Er, yes. It's a Coca Cola." 

Grandmother: "That's amazing. It looks extraordinarily like a *Coca Cola*." 

Me: "It's extraordinary, yes." 

Grandmother, with quiet disgust: "I just couldn't imagine any daughter or granddaughter of mine ordering such a thing."

Conversation, needless to say, unfolds naturally from that point. 

My grandmother: "I so admire how you keep up with friends from all different times of your life." 

Me: "Oh, well, I'm not that good. It's just easier in the age of Facebook." 

My nonna, darkly: "Maybe TOO easy."

Me: "Uh, what do you mean by that?"

My nonna, who's never been on Facebook except to be shown pictures by my mother: "People feel free to post the minute details of their day, and its nothing but trivia."

Me: "Well, but there's..."

Nonna: "Trivia!" [Now she's really yelling.] "TRIVIA!!!"

Me: "I had no idea you felt so strongly...."

(We've had this same conversation several times since then.  "How do you know this?" I ask her.  She gives me a knowing smile and a sidelong glance: "People tell me things.")


On the way home from brunch, my grandmother doesn't care for the way another driver honks at us. So, naturally, this is what she says: "I don't know any rude hand signals. I must learn some. I think receiving a rude hand signal from a nonagenarian woman would be a very effective deterrent in situations like this, don't you?"


She immediately transitioned from this to telling me about witnessing her father have a heart attack (from which he shortly died) when she was a teenager. I'd never heard this story before.

It was a roller-coaster drive back from brunch.