Just got done watching All The President’s Men on WNET, PBS’s local affiliate… sounds like a quiet cry for help, if you listen just right (“Pleeeease! Our funnnding! Impeach the bastard! Helllllp us! Here, we’ll even show you how it’s done…”) Anyway it was really nice to be watching just now, after a few weeks of studying for my certification exams; a little fantasia of Good Journalism viewed from an armchair in this department of communications I call home. I fantasize about being that good of a reporter. Dunno if Woodstein really strategized that way, but it was wicked cool if they did.
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Do you have any idea what this is?
It’s an ecstasy I never dreamed possible.
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So I’m studying for my certification exams. That’s DOCTORAL certification exams, to you. No, I am NOT studying to be a teacher. Little known fact, Teachers College is especially well-known for its program in Organizational Leadership, and on top of training top-notch teachers it also has programs in counselling, health, cultural studies, cognitive research, and other subjects where doc students are likely to be a little touchy if you assume they’re hard up for babysitting work. The papers I am about to get from TC do not authorize me to get anywhere near your children. At least as far as the NCLB crowd cares. Heaven forfend, I might suggest recess for the little darlings.
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Schools have two autumns. Where everyone else feels the shutting down of things, the small deaths of plants and the departure of birds as summer ends, the life of schools begins to fade at the beginning of summer, at graduation. On campus, cherry blossoms are elegiac; every year the dogwoods flower in late April, and when you see them bloom you know people will be leaving you. The mature shade of summer trees is vapid and bemused at the place’s idleness, a death in its own right.
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I am having a Moment of Mania.
On the bus home today I returned to a book I picked up around the time I was reading Lyotard — Matt Hills’s Fan Cultures. I had a hunch an idea that had been plaguing me — that fantasy fans are considered nerds because their interest in magical possibilities contradicts capitalist rationalism — had surely been covered by someone else, and I was right. Today I went back to see if Hills had anything to say about spaces, as I have a final on them due Tuesday, and found he does. It’s something on fan tourism, in which the author talks about going to Vancouver to be closer to X Files zeitgeist.
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