Tuesday, January 27, 2015

By necessity, life slows down...if only for a day


Thankfully, the power is back on. We were without for only about five hours this morning. But the blizzard still rages--and Juno is supposed to be with us on into tonight.

DH is sick: either a reaction to immunization yesterday, or that flu bug certainly floating around our pediatricians' office. (Why didn't I ask to wait on this appointment until we're back?)

So now I am in his room as he sleeps. Braškė is catching up on her sleep--I was up and watching earlier last night, and then she was "on duty" later in the night / early morning.

Finished my Havel book. Drinking coffee, watching the trees whip in the snowy wind. Monitoring his breathing. Making sure we still have power.

There's nowhere to go today--and we can't even shovel until the wind abates. No push to pack or clean--at least not until he's healthier.

No: today is, ironically, a luxury. Life has slowed down.

Saturday, January 10, 2015

Revisiting the "Glory Years"

It may not be Ice Bowl II, but it's going to be chilly tomorrow when the Cowboys come to Green Bay for their divisional playoff. And when we start talking Ice Bowl, I start thinking about a record I checked out from the city library so many times I could recite chunks of it by heart...


The Packer Glory Years features radio commentary from the three-year run of NFL championships, culminating with Bart Starr's quarterback sneak to win the Ice Bowl against Dallas. It all happened before I was born, but throughout the perpetually 4-8 1970s (at least that's how I remember them), the Packer legacy was imprinted on me--largely through this record. And thanks to the glory of YouTube, I go back and listen to it again about once a year.

We played our share of pickup football, and I'm sure it had something to do with my concurrent fascination with tabletop football games. And there is the curious case of recording the play-by-play of a couple Super Bowls that HAS to be on a cassette somewhere or other still--with Troy Wiegand doing color commentary!

This was the match-up I was hoping for this week--Packers/Cowboys has been a great rivalry well beyond the Ice Bowl, after all. In particular, I'm thinking about the 1990s when Green Bay seemed like they just couldn't get past Dallas. Texas was a cruddy place to be a Packer fan in the early-to-mid 90s, though the emergence of the sports bar helped to mitigate greatly (and was a nice way for a grad student to blow steam before hitting the books again)...

I remember being at Adam & Yael's wedding reception in Boston, stealing updates at the bar during a particularly brutal Packer loss in Dallas during the 1996 playoffs. It became clear that GB needed home-field advantage, and it made every game of the 1996 season matter--which was extra fun, because I was back home in Arizona that fall, saving up for my first trip to Lithuania. Dad and I would go to a sports bar on the west side of town after church--it was our thing. I could wax poetic about that year's Super Bowl win--against who? oh yes, the Patriots!--but let's double back to this weekend's game with the Cowboys.

In the greater scheme of things, football means a lot less to me than it did 20, 30, or 40 years ago. Still, tomorrow's game takes me back to elementary school in Manitowoc: playing football, playing football board games, listening to records of football games. As DH drags our chairs around the living room, and I'm washing dishes listening to this recording, it all comes back.

How can I not smile?

Thursday, January 8, 2015

This week, my 229ers wrote on a particular track for a "sound & semiotics" paper... here's the Spotify playlist!

 

Monday, January 5, 2015

The brave new world of Intersession


It's Opening Day today for the university's (relatively) new offering: two-week Intersession classes, wedged between New Year's Day and MLK Day. I'm teaching Foundations of Media Studies (COMM 229) online, a class I feel most comfortable trying out in this accelerated format.

"Accelerated" is kind of under-selling it. I mean, I prefer to spread out my summer classes across both sessions, for a 10-week class. This way, it's a little more rapid than the 14-week semester, but not as condensed as the 5-week flavor.

But now take each of those ten summer school weeks of COMM 229, and make each of them a day. Now put the petal to the metal for ten days, and you've got yourself an Intersession class.

Dear Lord.

Inevitably, some things need to change--for instance, weekly (would-be daily) screenings have been sacrificed in favor of recommending we talk about Boyhood (2014) as something of a case-study of key concepts. And besides, it's kind of fun to make a pedagogical bet that this one will win the Best Picture Oscar this spring... 

Gusties (and other fellow travelers) are familiar with the January Term ("J-Term"!) in which you'd take a single class for the month--the idea being that you could explore something outside your major while having a different kind of rhythm on campus. By definition, J-Term classes could not count towards other requirements--it was its own requirement, as I remember. So when several friends and I took Television Criticism, it was because it seemed like a cool idea--not a way to chip away at the dreaded Speech-Comm major. Of course, a lot of people thought it was a lark to be able to watch TV for college credit...until they really got their heads around the readings and such.

So let's see how this works--maybe in 25 years' time, someone will think back on this class, the way I'm remembering Gustavus in January 1988...