I wanted to say in class..

I actually wanted to sing in class.

I was shocked to find out that the majority of my peers have never heard Alice's Restaurant. I wanted so badly to belt out one of my favorite songs. But, alas, I have a terrible voice and I'm too shy to sing in front of people.

So instead I've found a link where you all can watch the movie, which basically just disects and explains the song in great detail, entailing all of the original people to act out the basis of the song again in the form of a film.

But seriously. Watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0jfwlWDgto

Enjoy!

Dream #2: I Swear It's Tuesday

On Monday morning I awoke as usual with the annoying buzzing of my alarm. And, as usual I turned off my annoying alarm and went right back to bed. I had the most vivid dream of waking up and realizing the day was Tuesday, not Monday. And this would all be fine except for the fact that I was supposed to meet with Simon Dixon, and the freshman in my section of Texts and Critics in order to conduct the midterm reviews on Monday afternoon. I was trying to rationalize (in my dream) how I could have possibly missed out on a whole day. The only explaination I could think of is that the previous day I had assumed was a Sunday, so I did not attend classes. In which case, I could conceivable wake up on Tuesday and realize with horror that I had all together missed my Monday.

I awoke from my sleep and first thing started to compose an apologetic email to Simon, attempting to explain how I had accidentally gotten my days all mixed up, and thought that yesterday was Sunday, when it was indeed a Monday, So I thought that today was Monday, when turned out to actually be Tuesday, and therefore I missed all of the responsibilities I was supposed to be doing on the actual Monday. Halfway through the email, I stopped to check my calander. It was Monday. I hadn't skipped Monday, I had not misidentified my Sunday, and it was not at all a Tuesday. It was all just a dream.

The man I met from Phraxos

I was attempting to reach the Greek island of Paros from the Aegean coast of Tukey, a task I did not for see to be with as difficult or time consuming as it turned out to be. I had been sleeping in my hammock for about a week before I spent many sleepless nights on varies ferries that went to islands that were not at all my final destination. I had made a plan with one of my older brothers almost a month beforehand. Neither of us had a phone, or Internet, nor had we been in contact with each other at all. We had made a plan to meet on a certain date at the ferry station on the island of Paros. I was already three days late before I even arrived in Athens. 

Athens was not at all what I expected. I arrived at the Piraeus port at 6 am, after sleeping on the cold and windy deck of a ferry for the last 14 hours. In order to stretch my tight muscles and weary legs, I sat down on the e,pty side walk to do some yoga poses. That is when I met the man from Phraxos. I do not remember his name, and in my dreary haze I listened patiently as he introduced himself. He was in his late 70s and had a thick mop of grey hair. He carried with him a very large stomach and was dressed as if he were headed to the beach. The man from Phraxos invited me over to his house for lunch. As I didn't have to be on a ferry until late that night I thought I might as well.

In his apartment, the man from Phraxos proceeded to tell me his entire life story; his childhood on the remote island, his wife, his children, and his job before retirement working customs at the port. I wasn't interested so much as I was too tired to do anything else. Ruins were beginning to bore me, so acropolis seemed like more of a chore than a treat. I guess I had nothing better to do than to eat sandwiches and drink coffee with this old man from Phraxos.

But as the day progressed, I started to feel trapped; as if I were no longer a guest but a prisoner. I no longer wanted to listen to this old man tell me about his life. I wanted to go swimming. I wanted to find a shady place to set up my hammock and take a nap. I wanted to eat pistachio ice cream. I wanted to leave. I couldnt leave. I made some excuses, but the lure of free food kept me a little bit longer. (I was not used to living on the euro, and my budget was almost non existent). By now, I really did want to leave. He grabbed me by the wrist, pulled me to him. He offered to pay me for sex. How betrayed I felt. This man who I had felt to connected to, who had taken me into his home and fed me and told me stories of his childhood and of his wife, and now he wont let me go. More than I feel disgusted, I feel deeply wounded. Tricked. I run out of his front door, down his steps and begin to walk briskly down the street back towards the port. Oh shit. My suitcase. Of course I had left my suitcase in the trunk of his car. In my shame I knocked at his apartment door, I had somehow become dependent on this man. All of my worldy belongings were in his car: My clothes, my alchemical guidbook, my journal, juggling balls, hand blown glass marbles, calcite crystals from Montana, an amethyst crystal from Cappadocia, my fire dancing equiptment. He had everything in the world that I cared about,  locked up in the back of his truck.

It took me almost half way through reading The Magus before I realized what my connection to Nicholas's island was. The only man I have ever known from Phraxos was kind to me. He showed interest in my for no particular reason, and took me into his home to tell me the stories of his life and to feed me wonderful Greek food. But, he tricked me. He betrayed my trust. And that is the only man I have ever met from the island of Phraxos.

Here is a photo of me on the island if Paros (I did indeed make it there eventually), relatively close to the island of Phraxos where Nicholas resided.

Dream #1: Mythic Coat Inspiration

I had a dream about two weeks ago about a coat. It is when ended up inspiring me to create an appliqued mythic coat for my final project! I had a dream about a patchwork leather coat. It's shape is remeniscent of a leaf, and the hood is pointy, as if it belongs to an elf. it corsets down the back with tea stained lace, and the hood and pockets are trimmed with purple rabbit fur. all along the hem, there are two or three layers of gathered lace. The lining is really special. A few years ago, my brother was working in China, and brought be back a dozen yards of beautiful silk brocade that he purcased at a fabric market. I've been waiting for exactly the right project before I cut into this beautiful fabric. This silk will line the inside of my literal deram coat.

I awoke in the middle of the night and had to sketch this coat. It was the first time in about nine months that I've been truly inspired to sew somthing beautiful. But, seeing as I have never made a coat with this particular pattern that I envision, I need to make one out of cheaper materials first as a pratice run. This practice coat will be the one that I make for this class. My mythic dream coat.

Magus: The First 50 Pages

First, I apologize that I have been behind in my blogs. I don't own a working computer, nor do I have internet where I live, so I have been jotting handwritten notes in my notebook all semester whilst I read instead of blogging regularly. That being said, I was flipping through my notebook and found my reaction to the Magus when I was a mere 50 pages into the book and found it amusing.

I cried for almost the entire first 50 pages to this book. I'm not sure why, as it is not outwardly sad, but it struck an unexpected chord. I was sitting on the floor of my apartment cuddled next to the sketchy antique gas heater in a bundle of blankets with a cup of loose leaf earl grey tea. It was the recipe for my favorite kind of night. But instead, as I started the Magus, I found myself moved. And depressed. And all sorts of other emotions that welled up.Why would somebody write such a book? People who hate themselves and hate each other, and hate life, but are too cowardly to do anything about it.

Alas, my boyfriend and his roommate showed up to my house just as Alison was leaving for work, and Nicholas is leaving for Greece. Of course friends decide to surprise me in the height of my crying fit. I could not wrap m head around the idea of going out to the bar when my book was so viscerally effecting me. I did indeed go out to the bar, but the whole time was thinking to myself "why am I partaking in meaningless small talk when I could be at home. reading?" And so I went home. And read my sad book.

Quality in Education

Quality in education cannot be defined by any over-arching words that encompass all students of all kinds. Quality means something different for each student who seeks education, and what is valuable inside a classroom, and at a university differs greatly. This is why there are big schools, small schools, pre-professional schools, and liberal arts schools, just to scratch the surface. For me, a quality education requires professors who care about their students. Teachers who put the well-being and success of their pupils before their own research, or anything else. I personally can only receive this in a small classroom environment; where teachers and students interact on a personal level, and the teachers understand the learning needs of the student body. A quality education comes from not only a strong classroom experience, but a large support network outside of the classroom. It comes from advisers and department heads; faculty and staff both working together to create an academic sanctuary. 

Every student has a different idea of what quality and success means to them. In order to provide a student with quality, educators must know how to meet the needs each of their students individually. This might sounds unrealistic. We need more teachers, smaller classes, more individualized educations, and educators that care about their students, not just about their own research. 

In The Secular Scripture, I was Startled to Read:

Startled might be a little bit strong. To rephrase, I might say that I read something that I found particularly thought provoking. 

On pages 47-48 in The Secular Scrpiture, Frye brings up the difference between "and then", and "hence". The distinction that Frye makes between narrative using the terminology "and then" as opposed to the terminology "hence", and the implications of these little words really stuck with me. In terms of coincidences, I could not help but imagining if all of the stories we old used the word "hence", implying a deterministic nature of coincidences. I guess that this would lead us back to our previous argument about coincidence versus synchronicity. If the word "hence" were always to be used in real life instead of the words "and then", than all coincidence would instead be synchronicity. 

It's not that the reading itself startled me, but I startled myself in how much I clung to this notion. I was sitting in the library desperately wishing that we lived in a world of "hence"s. A world where all coincidences meant something much larger than two similar events. A world of "and then" is so boring. so tedious. A world that has little room for magic. A world of "hence", on the other hand, allows us a world full of meaning; where every action determines the actions to come. Further, imagine if we all lived in a world where even though coincidences were merely "and then", as they are today, but we treated our own choices as if they had "hence" implications? Wouldn't the world be a better place to live in? 

I'm sorry, I stray quite a bit from the book. I was startled by my own reaction to a seemingly small idea presented in this book.

The Secular Scripture

Here are a few things that Frye compares to one another:

Imagination vs reality
Romantic vs realistic
Asleep (dreaming) vs waking (reality
horizontal vs vertical
and then vs hence
work vs play
created scripture vs revealed scripture

Random thoughts, notes, quotes, and questions:

p. 24: Do you think that popular literature is really a waste of time, as is suggested?

p. 36: Displacement: The adjusting of a formulaic structure to a roughly credible context.

p.42: "...What gives a novelist moral dignity is not the story he tells, but a wisdom and insight brought to bear on the world outside literature, and which he has managed to capture within literature.

p. 43: So, Frye identifies a problem of people concentrating on what the book talks about rather than what is actually presents.

p. 45: Victorian art and literature being very representative of the world, because that was a reflection of values at the time. What values of today are reflected in modern art and literature?
"What is being said about society that the story is reflecting?"

p. 47-48: Can real life coincidences be described in terms of  "hence" narrative? if so, what does this imply about fate and determinism as opposed to if coincidences are described with "and then" narrative?

p. 52: "The general principle is that the higher us we are, the more clearly we can see the bottom of the action as a demonic parody of the top." Meaning, the further away we are from a past action, the better we can see that our own lives are merely displacements of previous things that have already happened to us.

p. 56: Is it possible that film has indeed destroyed realism in literature?


The romance seeps out into the world that it reflects.

United Postal Service

Dr. Sexson said that if he told us that if he said we would see UPS trucks, than we would indeed start to see UPS trucks everywhere. He was wrong. I have yet to see a UPS truck.