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Jan. 15th, 2014 11:56 pmToday, I start on Gauri Viswanathan's Masks of Conquest. It went OK.
Yesterday I embarrassingly missed a meeting moved earlier to the morning before the lecture I TA for. Then I had a very late lunch with my friend who is moving back to Germany until the fall. Then in the evening, a GSA meeting. It went well.
Anyway, today after office hours, I hung out with Germany friend, another guy in the dept who does French, and guy who does Vietnamese music and affect (and has written 50 pages of a prospectus which impresses me because he doesn't often act like he has his shit together). Lunch was a shared pizza and after some random conversation (friend French is an incipient father, and friend German and friend Viet had calculated the timing and realized the pregnancy coincides with the time friend French passed quals. We are now calling the incoming baby "Quals Baby") it turned to how all these friends passed quals.
It was.... surprisingly useful and comforting. One thing I love about my dept is how supportive we are of each other and I'm hoping to be able to continue that culture with incoming grads. It also tells me that my initial idea of writing summaries is a good one even though I don't actually want to.
Friend French and I walked together after lunch because he parked his car closer to my place (he lives in Irvine) and we got to know each other a little better. It was pretty cool; we've had a seminar before but we never really chatted much.
After my nap I got started on watching videos for the Global Indigenous Media class! There're more hip hop vids to watch, and then stuff on Indigenous Humor... lots of 1491s and a bit of standup. I posted a few favs to Tumblr, but I also really liked "Slapping Medicine Man" because at heart I am a simple person who thinks simple violence is a good answer to anything. What the 1491s reminded me of strongly are Super Indian Comics--there's a strong strain of self-deprecating humour that highlights the struggles that NDNs face, lots of self-parody and snuck-in punch-up satire.
We also had to read an article on Apache humour, some of which parodies Whitemen, which says a lot about social codes and playing pretend. It's really fascinating and deeply culturally embedded, so part of me being impressed is how the ethnographer laid out the details. It makes me wonder what details I'm missing out.
Yesterday I embarrassingly missed a meeting moved earlier to the morning before the lecture I TA for. Then I had a very late lunch with my friend who is moving back to Germany until the fall. Then in the evening, a GSA meeting. It went well.
Anyway, today after office hours, I hung out with Germany friend, another guy in the dept who does French, and guy who does Vietnamese music and affect (and has written 50 pages of a prospectus which impresses me because he doesn't often act like he has his shit together). Lunch was a shared pizza and after some random conversation (friend French is an incipient father, and friend German and friend Viet had calculated the timing and realized the pregnancy coincides with the time friend French passed quals. We are now calling the incoming baby "Quals Baby") it turned to how all these friends passed quals.
It was.... surprisingly useful and comforting. One thing I love about my dept is how supportive we are of each other and I'm hoping to be able to continue that culture with incoming grads. It also tells me that my initial idea of writing summaries is a good one even though I don't actually want to.
Friend French and I walked together after lunch because he parked his car closer to my place (he lives in Irvine) and we got to know each other a little better. It was pretty cool; we've had a seminar before but we never really chatted much.
After my nap I got started on watching videos for the Global Indigenous Media class! There're more hip hop vids to watch, and then stuff on Indigenous Humor... lots of 1491s and a bit of standup. I posted a few favs to Tumblr, but I also really liked "Slapping Medicine Man" because at heart I am a simple person who thinks simple violence is a good answer to anything. What the 1491s reminded me of strongly are Super Indian Comics--there's a strong strain of self-deprecating humour that highlights the struggles that NDNs face, lots of self-parody and snuck-in punch-up satire.
We also had to read an article on Apache humour, some of which parodies Whitemen, which says a lot about social codes and playing pretend. It's really fascinating and deeply culturally embedded, so part of me being impressed is how the ethnographer laid out the details. It makes me wonder what details I'm missing out.