Open Mike Night

To Max's last night for their Wednesday Open Mike Night. A colleague of mine, Mike, was performing and since he's always super nice to me I thought it would be a friendly gesture to attend. It's a fairly cozy spot, not too crowded but pleasantly proportioned and with a variety of tasty beers on tap. The music, though ... Bloomington is known for its music scene - our music school is world-class apparently, but man I can only listen to so many John Mayerish dudes with acoustic guitars before I get bored. There was also a large woman in a fluffy pink sweater who accompanied herself on keyboard as she sang Italian madrigals or something.

Mike, however, was awesome. His bio on the department website says that after college he "embarked on a series of misadventures involving (but not limited to) marriage, fatherhood, employment as a federal agent, and a sojourn in the Los Angeles music scene." So I was expecting him to be good. His girlfriend Sonja told me he was into punk, and I don't know from punk, but that's not exactly how I would have described it. He played songs called "Brian Wilson as a Pillow" and "Pomegranate Seeds in the Creases." He made weird noises with his guitar and twitched and spazzed around. (He's a gangly, oddly dressed guy nearing middle age with patches of wild graying hair.) He sounded sort of like if Tristan Tzara got high and then listened to The Residents all night. (I told him this and he didn't seem displeased but I kind of feel bad anyway.) It's not the kind of music I really get or enjoy, but watching him up there, so utterly in his own world, made me very happy. (Also speaking of music, I find this video absolutely hilarious:


Who is this? And what was the deal with 80's hair?)

I may have to become a Republican...

...Just so I can vote against this guy. He's actually listed on the ballot as "Tony Hvfvgpd Zirkle," but Google doesn't have any matches if you include his (alleged) middle name. What. The. Christ. I also love how that's pretty much what people here look like.

Here's some more Tony Zerkle madness.

Great Chieftain of the Puddin-Race

Last night I accompanied Cufflinks to a Burns Supper at his friend Amity's house. This is one of those times when it pays to have my always-say-yes policy: months ago, Cufflinks invited me, Sam, and Krista to the Spoon to listen to music and only I said yes. Saying yes to one interesting thing leads inevitably to doing something interesting, and as often as not leads to more interesting things later on down the line. Saying no to interesting things leads to writing the world's most boring memoir. But I digress.

I will try anything once, food-wise, and when I Wikipedia'd haggis my first question was not "Why on earth would anyone eat such a thing?" but "Where in Bloomington can you buy a sheep stomach and when can I go there?" It turns out that you actually can't, which is kind of disappointing in a way, but the unavailability of the correct offal actually made Amity's haggis WAY more delicious than actual haggis probably is. Hers was like muttony meatloaf, and though I don't like meatloaf especially I do like mutton. It was served, as is traditional, with tatties and neeps, as well as a really good soup, kale, and stewed apples.

(Cufflinks, of course, didn't eat anything but the potatoes. He is the world's pickiest eater and I find it profoundly annoying. He won't eat any fruits or vegetables, ever. A boy who won't eat an apple clearly has something wrong with him. Probably scurvy.)

We did the whole shebang - toasting the haggis and Robert Burns with various scotches (some were peaty, some were smoky, all were very liquory and disgusting. Mixing them with Scotch water, a grainy potion of water, sugar, and oatmeal, did not help at all). Cufflinks did the toast to the lasses (it's supposed to be "amusing but not offensive" and I urged him to bawdy it up but he didn't, really) and most of the poems because he was able to do the accent. And there was dancing - someone tried to show me how to waltz but I was hopeless and he gave up on me, laughing - and the shortbread I'd made using Laurie Colwin's recipe was a big hit. After supper the men lit up honest-to-God pipes, so the room had a not-unappealing old-mannish smell.

All in all it was a most satisfactory adventure, which is what happens when you say yes.

My toes are numb

It is ten degrees out and I had to go to the laundromat, because I haven't done laundry in, oh, three weeks or so and it is becoming a problem. I had so much laundry and the laundromat is so far away I could only manage to carry my darks, so after classes today I will have to go back and do my whites, which is a total drag. Carrying all my clothes seven blocks to the laundromat in ten-degree weather is making me REALLY wish I had a car. Maybe a 1971 Buick Riviera.

Yesterday I made a loaf of Laurie Colwin's long-rise whole wheat bread. It rose all day while I was in class and then after a short second rise it was ready to bake. It came out of the oven just in time for dinner, and K and I had a cozy, if somewhat austere, meal of bean soup and warm, crusty bread. This bread makes me happy because it uses three kinds of flour (the more flours a bread involves, the happier I am), one of which is a stone-ground wheat from a local mill, which I got at the farmers' market this fall. I am looking forward to the farmers' market starting up again ... I am getting ready for spring.

I think this week I will buy some sort of meat, maybe a chicken.

Culture Clash

Dealing with people from other cultures can be very challenging, as everyone knows, but it's easy to forget how many different cultures exist side by side within our own country, or even within my own apartment. (Well, in that case only two, but it's still a challenge occasionally.) I've settled into my department reasonably well, I think, but there's no denying that my colleagues here are, by and large, of very different backgrounds than most of the people I knew in college or high school. Before grad school, I had only really known one seriously Christian person my age; here, they're everywhere. I was downtown today and I saw people holding signs and from a distance I thought they were Women in Black but in fact they were protesting against abortion. Things are different out here; they are not what I'm used to.

I don't know what the rules are for dealing with these people. Okay, I'll cut to the chase: I have no idea what it means when an Evangelical Christian boy puts his hand on a girl's knee. Does it mean he thinks she's easy? Is this the sort of thing one ought to slap someone for, possibly with a glove? Is it a test of some sort? Surely the Christians have rules for touching each others' bodies, but since I don't know what these rules are, I feel like a laowai again. Of course, I'm new to this whole coed thing, too, so I can't say for certain, but I suspect that in secular society, a hand on the knee is not a huge deal, but who knows? No one has ever spelled this stuff out for me; I just have to make it all up as I go along.


ETA: Krista informs me that you'd have to be really conservative - "like, Amish conservative" - for knee-touching to be a really big deal. Good to know that, once again, I am making mountains out of molehills.

Old life meets new

This weekend my college chum Andrea came out to Bloomington for a visit. She's a junior, a few years younger than I am, but we were very close my last year at Smith and she's still very dear to me. There's always some difficulty when one has houseguests to entertain, but matters were simplified somewhat by the fact that she was sick, so she didn't seem to mind a lot of downtime, reading quietly together on the couch or watching Mystery Science Theater 3000.

She got in Thursday evening, so I thought to take her to the Runcible Spoon, where Cufflinks and I always go for Thursday night old-time music, but on this particular Thursday the band wasn't there and in fact the place was dead. Nevertheless we shared a bottle of Cabernet and had a good meal and astonishingly good cake and caught up on all the Smith gossip. On Friday we had a leisurely morning and then went to the IU art museum, which is really quite respectable. There was a large collection of Marcel Duchamp readymades which I particularly enjoyed. That evening we went to the GPSO's monthly happy hour, which was, as ever, packed with philosophers. Afterwards we came back to my apartment and made ravioli from scratch - spinach pasta with a filling made from ricotta cheese, red wine, parmesan, tomato paste, and roasted garlic. Andrea had never made pasta before so I think she enjoyed it.

Saturday we went grocery shopping (always entertaining!) and then spent the afternoon reading and baking an apple pie to take to a dinner party at Cufflinks' house. I'd told him we could bring a pie and then immediately wished I hadn't, because baking a pie to take to a boy's house seems so ... Pleasantville. (Krista and Andrea convinced me that "No one will think Wow, Emily sure went to a lot of trouble to bake a pie for Cufflinks," particularly since, as Krista pointed out, I have a reputation for cooking - apparently the other day over nachos our colleague Sam asked her whether I'd ever made salsa, which Krista was able to say that I had.)

We bundled up and hiked to Cufflinks', pie in tow, and there we had really good jambalaya made by the fiddle player from the old-time band and his girlfriend, and then we all watched Boondock Saints and Coffee and Cigarettes, both quite good films.

All in all, perhaps not a terribly exciting visit, but it was marvelous to see Andrea and I hope she had a nice time.

Facial tattoos are a bad idea.

Since sometime in September it has been a more or less weekly tradition that Cufflinks and I go to the Runcible Spoon on Thursdays to listen to this old-time band that plays there. Cufflinks rolls his nasty-smelling cigarettes and talks to his friends and I watch the musicians and the Runcible scene, which is very Bloomington and interesting. Lot of facial tattoos, which always makes me wonder what could possibly possess someone to do such a thing, but I guess it takes all kinds.

Last week Cufflinks was talking to one of his bearded friends and I was drifting in and out of listening - Cufflinks doesn't really try to draw me into these conversations, which is the thing I like least about him - and the bearded guy was talking about some director he doesn't like because he's wantonly cruel to his characters - he just tortures them for no reason. It made me wonder: can we have ethical responsibilities to nonexistent objects? It seems like the answer is probably no (the conventional wisdom in philosophy is that there are no nonexistent objects, which don't even get me started). Still, it would be an interesting way to explain why we would look askance at someone who wrote a story in which he just did awful things to his characters for no reason. Kind of a nifty aesthetics/metaphysics/ethics problem, I thought.

I'm sick, for about the third or fourth time this year, which is insane. Maybe I should start buying orange juice or God forbid exercising or something. (2008 is going to be the year I visit the IU gym, I swear it!) It's such a drag because Andrea, my dear college chum, is coming out for a visit this weekend, and she's sick too, so it looks like we might not be up for any extremely riotous good times. Of course, it's not at all clear to me that there are any to be had; I can't find any exciting doings this weekend and I don't know how I'm going to entertain her. It's kind of worrying me.

Shouldn't Emily be told to keep her window shades all pulled completely down?

On Friday, a group of philosophers (principally ethicists, including one Nietzsche scholar, but there were two logicians and a Kierkegaardian in attendance, as well) went out to a honky-tonk bar outside of town for some karaoke. The place was packed, and a very Indiana sort of scene. (When he suggested the outing, Andrew informed us that "the cutters" would be there.) I didn't know many of the songs, but there were some impressive performances, including an old man who did the macarena - funny for about five seconds, but then shame-inducing, what with all the gratuitous pelvic thrusting. The highlight, however, was Luke, who did a version of "Harper Valley PTA" which will stay with me until my dying day. Luke is so my hero - he even included shoutouts to our party - mine was particularly apropos (see subject line). So that was all most diverting and satisfactory.

Also this weekend I read Quine, watched a lot of Degrassi, and made a very successful rice pudding (the recipe is here; I reduced the sugar by half with no ill-effects). Pretty good, but my quest for the perfect rice pudding continues. It's a journey.

Glee!

I'm in a pretty good mood. I had productive morning reading Davidson and Sartre, followed by two classes: Computational linguistics and Philosophy of Language, both of which fill me with glee. After class I had a long nap and a decent dinner (polenta marinara, which is delightfully easy to make), and then I read more Sartre.

He certainly looks jolly and wall-eyed, doesn't he?

So that's all good-mood-making. Plus, who could be glum in a world where Adam Busch's nose exists? (see below - he's all filled with evil merriment)

But, lest we forget that life is a veil of tears, here is Husserl to glare us into submission:

Husserl is all, "one is inclined to interpret, as if this were obvious, immanence as genuine immanence (reelle Immanenz) and even perhaps to interpret it psychologically, as immanence in something real (reale Immanenz): the object of cognition, too, is within the cognitive process as a real actuality, or in the [stream of] ego-consciousness of which the mental process is a part."

Ugh, Husserl, buddy, why? Prof Spade says Husserl is the worst writer of all time. One lecture into "The Idea of Phenomenology," I am inclined to agree.

However, tomorrow I have my Tractatus study group, which should make it all okay. Let's get back to glee with smiley Wittgenstein on a patio or something:


There. That's better.

Bulgar is no friend of mine

Holy cajolery, I am hungry. For dinner tonight I had Bulgar Pilaf and steamed broccoli, which is every bit as grim as it sounds. I know I deserve what I get for cooking something called Bulgar Pilaf, but still. I even tried to make it more palatable with a little margarine, but it didn't help.
The best part is, I still have POUNDS of it left for the rest of the week!

Slightly more successful was last night's Tomato Macaroni Pie, which is not actually a pie, just macaroni and a can of tomatoes, sprinkled with cheese and baked in a pie dish. Kind of Midwesterny but wholesome and tasty.

Today was my second day of classes. I am very excited about JW's Philosophy of Language class. It is clear that, unless suitably restrained, I am going to be That Girl and answer every question she asks, often without raising my hand. I tried super hard today to only answer every third question or so, but there's nothing more painful than long silences when the teacher asks a question, and it's so tempting to just fill that silence with speech, be it well thought out and accurate or simply off-the-cuff blither.

Also exciting: my Sartre class, which is taught by a nifty old Continental philosopher whom I really like. He's very animated and funny, and super excited about Sartre, so that's all good.

Man, if there's one thing I love, it's being back in my routine. Break was nice and all, but this semester is going to be swell.