Hot off the press!

Back in 1998, I was floundering about for a dissertation topic when I took a graduate level French course on Cahiers du Cinéma with Carina Yervasi and was introduced to the concept of film journals. By this point, I had already learned a great deal about Latin American film history and, as a final project for this class, I decided to examine each and every page of Cahiers to look for material on Latin American film. This proved to be an arduous project -- but, oddly enough, also an exhilerating one, of sorts. (That paper is still in my electronic "trunk" of sorts, trying to burst its chains to try publication again. Quieto, quieto, soon, my friend...) I started looking for Latin American film journals written around the period of the 1960s and 70s, a high point of filmmaking from the region and discovered that the only one to survive the period of New Latin American Cinema from beginning to supposed end happened to come from Lima.

Lima? Peru?? Home?? But were there any movies made around then? Then why would one of the most respected film journals in Latin America come from a place that really didn't make any movies? It didn't make any sense.

Eleven years later, you can finally really read what I learned. Behold: my book. Finally. I hold the first copy, before the go on sale for real at the end of the month (although Amazon has it available at a discount for pre-order now! I know, I hate Amazon -- but, hey, discount!). In this picture, you can also see the snazzy cover art. I have to say: UPNE definitely knows how to make a pretty book. They rock.

Eleven years. Given that I've already started the next project, here's hoping it's not another decade until the next one. Huzzah!

Back from outer space (or maybe just Macchu Picchu)

I'm so very sorry that it's taken me this long to get posting again. In all honesty, I simply vowed that it wasn't right for me to blog while I still had some papers due back to my students. It's been a rougher semester than what I originally planned. Among other things, the infamous tenure file got submitted and I had to quickly race through edits on the book. Speaking of which, as it turns out, if you think I'm not legit about this whole getting published thing, I apparently now have an official ISBN! How exciting! You can now even read the synopsis, and even pre-order at Amazon! (Hopefully by the time a cover is designed and/or the book actually gets published, the powers that be will have figured out that my middle initial isn't "R." Sigh...) I can't think of anything more fabulous than that.

Well, maybe I can. Because you know what would be really fabulous? These days, I've been getting into Bollywood movies a little more. I even showed Dil se... to my general class this semester. What a shame, however, that I can't combine my growing interest for Bollywood films and my Peruvian heritage. I mean, wouldn't it be cool if, say, a Bollywood film were to film in Peru or somethng? Maybe some giant science fiction flick starring worldwide goddess Aishwarya Rai frolicking around Macchu Picchu with some alpacas frolicking in the background?


Well, well. Dreams really do come true!

And this flick might even be better than the last science fiction film set in Peru (which, mind you, encouraged the main Lima newspaper El Comercio to create a brand-new "no-stars" rating). The only reason to apparently see that flick was to catch super-telenovela hunk Cristian Meier naked. That, and a fake UFO over Maccu Picchu.

Hot for....

Jimmy Kimmel recently said that VP candidate Sarah Palin "looks like one of those women in the Van Halen videos who takes off her glasses, shakes out her hair, and then all of a sudden, she's in high heels and a bikini."

Like so:



Despite my love and appreciation for "Hot for Teacher," as someone who appreciates the English language (perhaps more so than Palin or Halen), I much prefer to be hot for words.

I mean, really, wouldn't you?

(h/t to Ange via GrammarBlog, who says "She makes me feel funny, like when we used to climb the rope in gym class." Ahem. Yes.)

The birth anouncement

Please welcome the birth of Writing National Cinema: Film Journals and Film Culture in Peru, which will be published by the University Press of New England sometime in 2009. The author, Jeffrey Middents, reports that he is exhausted but doing fine.

O Happy Day!

Cuarón! No, Cuar-off. No: on. Off. On again! Off? Sheesh...

Last year, I managed to successfully teach a summer course on auteurs. I had long loathed the idea of teaching a whole course about a single director, yaaaawn, but I thought that six weeks would be kinda brisk and fun. The course is actually more about general auteur study than anything else and each student has to pick their own director of choice to follow; as a class, however, I choose one director to follow as a case study. Last year was an easy choice: Pedro Almodóvar, chosen because now I could order all the wacky early stuff I had always wanted to see and so that I finally wouldn't have to choose whether I should screen Hable con ella or Todo sobre mi madre.

This year, I decided to put myself on a bit of a limb and chose Alfonso Cuarón. If Almodóvar was a risky choice of sorts, Cuarón is even more so, particularly since he only has a few features to his name thus far. This choice was inspired, however, by an offhand comment at an SCMS panel on Children of Men that I attended, where a panelist said, "When I went to see the movie, I wanted to know whether I would be getting the director of Y tu mamá también or the director of Harry Potter." And all I could think of was, But it's so clear it's the same guy. Hence: a good choice in my mind for an auteur study.

There is another reason: in doing the very preliminary research on Cuarón, I discovered there was very little written about him. Given my decade-long exploration of Peruvian cinema and my new fascination with shorts, hearing the phrase "barely anything written" was music to my ears and I made an initial pitch with a press at SCMS to write a book on Cuarón and they seemed receptive to the idea for a series on contempo directors. When the recent horrific snafu happened with the Peru book (still unresolved, though an answer may come forth next week, keep those fingers crossed), Angela suggested that since I actually tend to write conference papers with 48 hours to spare (it's true), why not try writing at least a draft of the whole book as I'm teaching the course. Not a bad idea, I thought. So my ulterior motive for teaching this course (much like the shorts course from two summers ago, now turning into a regular course for this fall) is to prep a larger academic work.

All great ideas, except for one thing: where are the students?

When summer registration was just beginning, I was pleasantly surprised that I had six students right off the bat; within a few days, I had 8. This was great: the last two summers, my classes had 7 students, then 6. (This, while a couple other literature courses had 20.) Now at least I wouldn't have to worry about my course. I turned my attention to the end of the semester.

Right before graduation, I got ready to send an email informing the class about the textbook we'd be using, in case they wanted to purchase it online or something. I looked at the roster and, to my horror, the list had not expanded, but shrunk in half. 4.

There was no way they would let the course run at 4.

And, of course, this was one of the only times I actually had all of my materials done ahead of time. Crapola. Why had this happened? Since most of the students who had dropped were from the MFA program, my first instinct was that the Mean Girls (TM) who had sabotaged my evaluations in the fall were now telling everyone to avoid my course. (Curses!) Then, I realized that was paranoid and the likelihood is that it's the economy, stupid, or something like that. Indeed, virtually all the summer courses in the department were drastically underenrolled.

Over the last week, the course fluctuated. We got as high as 6, which I felt comfortable would be allowed to go, but then dropped down to 5 again. I still had no idea on Friday whether or not the course would run and the administrator in charge of this (a pal) also had no clue, that decisions would be made on Monday. I broke the news to the class that we were on the bubble, asked them to ask friends if need be.

I looked yesterday morning: one more had dropped. Back to 4.

The administrator said that he could argue 5, but not 4 -- but that he would hold my course from cancellation on the off-chance, mainly because I knew at least one student might need it to graduate.

This morning, still at 4. The administrator sent me an e-mail saying it was off.

By this point, I had resigned myself. In the shower, I thought up of how I can teach the course in the spring anyway and how to teach it as a full-length course by adding Alejandro González Iñárritu to the mix and cribbing some ideas from a similar course taught by a friend on the Coen Brothers. I thought, hey, who says I can't still watch the movies and write the book? I'll invite friends for a summer film series and they can help me find things. There will be wine and food and great conversation every Wednesday. I'd miss the summer salary -- but this would be fun and productive! And I haven't had a summer like this in a few years? I toweled off, feeling happy with what I was doing with the summer, ready to start fresh. I logged online to get my class' emails so that I could let them know it had been canceled.

There were now 5 students.

Sometime in the hour it took me to shower and have lunch, another student had come into the course. I called the administrator. He said, "Congrats! Your course is a go!"

And as I watched the paycheck come back into view as the summer film series in my house faded away, I wasn't sure exactly how I should feel.

No se lo digas a nadie

I'm raising my head up from the morass (four piles down, two to go) with news that is not news -- or, rather, that I got news that I don't want to publicly advertise yet because it's not definite yet. (No, nobody's pregnant.) Nonetheless, it points to some very good news. I'll just leave it at that

With one week before the semester ends, it's back to the grind.

A little shook up

I had planned tonight to finally blog about something fun, but my parents just called to inform me that a really major earthquake hit Peru very close to Lima earlier this evening. For those not in the know, Ica is on the coast in the heart of wine country and not far from Nazca, where the lines are located. This quake measured somewhere between 7.5 and 7.9 on the Richter scale, which puts it in league with the last Big Quake to hit Peru in 1970, which is one of the worst ever to hit worldwide, having caused an avalanche that wiped out entire cities. Making that connection right now makes me so thrilled that this wasn't as big of a disaster as it clearly could have been. (Nontheless, this also disproves my theory that Larcomar, the posh mall built into said cliffs, would fall right into the ocean with the first major earthquake. I always said that that would bring new meaning to the phrase, "Shop 'Til Ya Drop." I slay me with my wit.)

For as dirty and horrible as it is -- indeed, there is a book from the 60s by Sebastian Salazar Bondy called Lima, la horrible -- I do still consider Lima as "the place where I come from," much more so than Long Island. Beyond my own academic work, I have very personal ties to the city and to the country. The odor of dust, smoke, smog and sea that greets me when I step off the plane at Jorge Chávez International Airport has long been the smell of home for me, something instantly familiar, if also bracing. In many ways, Lima is the worst part about Peru and the thing I hate the most -- and yet, it's home.

All that said, no matter how long I lived there, I never got over a (not necessarily irrational) fear of earthquakes, particularly the Big One which would (will? yikes) decimate Lima. I have never been in a really major earthquake, although living on the 15th floor of an apartment building made some major tremors seem pretty horrible. (One happened when I stayed home from school to get a paper done. My parents weren't home and I ran to the elevator shaft, where I prayed to God that if He would make it stop and brought my parents back safely, I would never stay home from class ever again just to get an extra day of work. I kept that promise, too.) Given Lima's location right on the fault line between the Nazca and South American tectonic plates (I think I have that right), the prospect of a Big Quake is an inevitability. Thankfully, this wasn't it. But -- and this is true -- I still occasionally randomly think of my family in a big quake and it hurts my heart in so many ways.

I will also confess this here and now: they say that what you fear most often brings about some great creativity -- and it is true that the long piece of fiction that has been sitting in my head for over a decade, waiting to come out (tenure, please... tenure...) is based around a seismic event.

In any case, my aunt called to say that everyone in the family was OK. In fact, one side of the family is now hunkered down in her house -- which is built like a giant concrete bunker -- just in case a stronger aftershock should come. My love goes out to them, and to everyone else in coastal Peru tonight.

Wow

Is that...?

Is it...?

A light? At the end of the tunnel?

Wow, so this is what it's like to be out of that tunnel? How warm the sun feels on my skin!

What a difference it feels to be...

...DONE.

(Quick edits start next week after Edmonton. And I finished about twelve hours after my latest self-imposed deadline. But at least it's all out on paper. Seriously, this is good news.)

Ketchup

A quick run-down about what I've been up to (and why I haven't been posting as often lately):

• A couple weeks ago, I got flown out to give a lecture on Peruvian cinema at University of Kansas as part of an Andean and Amazonian Worlds seminar put on by their Hall Center for the Humanities. I got the gig thanks to my colleague and friend (and collection co-editor) Tamara -- and it marks the first time that I've actually been brought anywhere to talk about my specialty. I also got to give a talk to undergrads at the Center for Latin American Studies. And here's the thing: not only was everyone really nice, but people were genuinely interested in what I had to say. Except for Tamara, I don't know any of these people at all. And every so often in academia, you wonder if what you're doing is really of any interest to anyone else but yourself -- you hope so, but you never know. Watching people take notes on what I said was quite the boost. (Plus, Lawrence and Kansas City turned out to be a pretty neat place! Who knew?)
• Last weekend, I was in Chicago at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, giving a paper entitled -- wait for it -- "It's Not Easy Bein' Brown: Rita Moreno, Lena Horne and The Muppet Show." It's my second foray into writing about television (come to think of it, the second writing about racial depictions in TV, the first one having already been published at the e-journal Slayage), which I don't have formal academic training in, but am slowly gaining some know-how. The story behind my wanting to do the paper is intriguing: two years ago, I was prepping my course on Stardom and wanted to do a unit on Lena Horne. I went looking for a famous episode of A Different World, but that was unavailable at the time. Instead, I found The Muppet Show, whose first season had just been released on DVD. The episode was (for me, at first) unusually milquetoast -- but then on a whim, I watched the episode on Rita Moreno. (I do have an academic interest in Rita Moreno, but that's a later endeavor.) Seeing the episodes back-to-back led to the idea for the paper -- and a year-and-a-half later, I've now given it. I may even try to pump it up a little further at another point.
• Visiting Chicago also gave me the opportunity to call on one James Chadd, one of my 'shmen from waaaay back when I was a UGA at Dartmouth. The last time I saw him, he was just about to graduate in '96; just over ten years later, he's doing wonderfully well working as an ER doctor in Chicago proper. (And, had I contacted him earlier, his apartment was only eight blocks from the conference site. Instead, I stayed at a friend's palce way up north in Andersonville; they weren't around, so I cat-sit for them, even making friends with Loopy Lucy.) Next year's conference: Philly.
• At the conference, I got to talk to a couple presses, who at least seem interested in the book. That's all I'll say for now, but I just have to keep plugging away. It's so close to being done -- I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
• Last week, I found out that I'll be teaching my standard into film course for University College next year. This means that instead of 50 students from across the university spectrum, I'll get around 20 students, all freshmen who will live on the same floor. This is a huge opportunity that I didn't even know I was being considered for until after it happened, so I'm thrilled at the chance to teach it. My schedule for next year is a bit odd, but is shaping up to be very nice, with my spring featuring only my stardom class and my grad seminar on film. (This means, for once, my spring will not feature a class at 8:30 AM! Woohoo!)
• Speaking of teaching, summer plans thus far: teaching a course on Almodóvar in May and June; Cape Cod at Ange's parents in July; my parents in A2 in August before the fall begins. In between, a conference in early June in Edmonton (also a fly-out!) on Peruvian exploitation film, and possibly a trip up to Hanover for reunion (#15!).
  
• I still have to choose the movie for my class' final project, which has to come out over the next couple weeks. I'm narrowing the choices now, having already seen one good candidate.
  
• And oh yes, looky that: someone's having a birthday next week. And man, is he turning two. With all that implies.
  

Things Come Together

Sometimes, good stuff happens in a surprising way. Today, for example:

• Xan, incredible kid that he is, finally figured out that when I turned around in the car and stuck my tongue out at him, that I was playing a game and that he shoould stick his tongue out back at me. (I have been doing this for several days now and each time I did this prior to today, he would shake his head, "Noooo! Idon'twantit!" This actually made me laugh, which is why I kept it up at all.)
• I got an absolutely incredible e-mail from an old student who is currently attending Sundance, thanking me for introducing him to Atom Egoyan in class six years ago, which means that I actually did make a difference to someone's life.
• After reading that, I also got my teaching evaluations from last semester and did pretty well. One class was way higher than I thought it would be; the other would have been the same except I clearly pissed someone off royally. (For every question, 45 people evaluated me in the top two categories and one person gave me the lowest score possible. Whoops.)
• The Oscar nominations are tomorrow morning, which I will show live in class. For once, I have no friggin' clue who will be nominated, much less win -- which actually makes it exciting.
  
• The hiring meeting at work was surprisingly congenial.
• Xan had a good bath day and I was requested to read Kitten's First Full Moon, which is my favorite, too.
• I discovered that I'm a network executive's worst nightmare, due to my lack of TiVo. I had been dreading today, when 24 and Heroes would finally go up against each other, but thought I had solved the problem when Angela started taking a class on Monday nights. Fine, I thought, I'll tape 24 and watch Heroes since she is into the former and not the latter. Except while I was watching Heroes, I kept turning back to 24, even though I was taping it, because I wanted to know. So it appears that I have made a decision anyway about my own TV watching habits and (alas) can dump one. (Sorry, Hiro!)
• Upon going down to our library to find my "marked-up" copy of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, I instead come upon a signed copy. I didn't know I had a signed copy. I just sat here staring at it for a moment.

Oh yes, and I finished chapter one of the book. It ain't pretty (yet) but it's out of my system. (The third attempt at writing this chapter seems to have done the trick.) Which means I now have Introduction through Chapter 7. Eight down, one more to go.

Not quite stranger than...

At dinner, Angela mentioned that one of the few blogs she reads was having a contest. The blog is written by an author who writes in several genres (under different names for all of them) and has some fun musings on writing. She also often gives away books to her readers, usually chosen at random from those who leave a comment responding to a particular question. In the spirit of the 12 days of Christmas, she is giving away a different assortment of books per day. Angela mentioned that this time she was giving away a writer's guide. "In fact," she mused, "I almost didn't enter because the guide is for erotic romance. But hey, I wanted the other book, so I entered. Who knows -- if I win, maybe I should take it as a sign."

Long story short: she won!

Look! A sign!

Maybe we'll have a race to publication? Now that would be fun.

---------
(A couple other random notes: Very soon, I will have a moment to detail last Sunday's events -- although KC's done a wonderful job already. And looky: blogger finally moved my blog over to beta! Yippee! Labels!)