Favorite Songs of 2009 Wednesday, Apr 14 2010 

music thisgaudygildedstage 2:55 pm

The next to last of my annual favorites lists is my favorite songs of 2009. It’s weird to be catching up on a list of favorite songs from last year, since I’ve already started accumulating favorites for this year! But it’s been really busy at work, so better late than never.

1. My favorite song of 2009 was Bishop Allen’s “Dimmer.”

Unfortunately, this is just about the only song I love off of Bishop Allen’s 2009 album, Grrr. But I do love this song’s quirkiness and lyrics. It’s all about feeling like you’re invisible, less worthy than others. It’s a great song, and I started singing along at the top of my lungs whenever it comes on my iPod in my car. I love it!

2. A very close second is Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” another song I sing along loudly whenever I hear it.

Not only is it very singable, but “Bad Romance” reminds me of the contradictory impulses that go along with being human. We want opposite things at the same time. We want things that we shouldn’t because we know they’re bad for us.

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Visiting the Red Light District in Amsterdam Monday, Apr 12 2010 

travel thisgaudygildedstage 10:42 am

While PJ and I were in Amsterdam last month, we walked around the Red Light District, mostly following the walking tour suggested by Rick Steves guide to Amsterdam. This walk was one of three aspects of Amsterdam that really reinforced that it is unlike any where else I’ve ever been: the legalized prostitution, the pot, and the canals definitely make this city unique!

This statue of a prostitute stands outside the Oude Kerk, which is surrounded by the Red Light District. It’s really bizarre to see bars, sex shops, and prostitutes standing in glass doorways in the buildings surrounding the church! Nothing like this exists anywhere in the U.S.

Two things impress me about this statue. First, it seems to try to capture a kind of dignity in its subject. This woman is standing tall with an almost haughty demeanor. She’s not a victim.

Second, and in contradiction to the first aspect, the dark material and the doorway framing the prostitute conveys a sense of imprisonment to me. There is a darker side to prostitution, this statue seems to say. [PJ notes the fact that she’s not bound by the frame and is emerging from it might also complicate this reading.]

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“All I” by Jill Scott Saturday, Apr 10 2010 

music and song of the week thisgaudygildedstage 6:33 pm

Today I drove up to Akron (3 hours) for a meeting and then drove back. It was a very successful meeting, so I’m glad I went. A couple of days ago I started listening to my iPod with the intent of listening to all 1300+ songs that I have on it. Six hours in the car seems barely to have made a dent!

While I was driving back home, Jill Scott’s “I Am” came on and I am now officially obsessed with it. It’s typical of Scott’s love songs: sexy, soulful, and genuine. I also love that it’s a song for adults. Here’s a YouTube video of the track from her 2007 album The Real Thing: Words and Sounds Vol. 3:

Here’s a video of her singing it live:

I love that she weaves lyrics from her other songs into this live version. Someday I HAVE to see her in concert — she’s such an amazing live performer (I love her live album!).

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Visiting the Rijksmuseum Monday, Apr 5 2010 

art and museums thisgaudygildedstage 7:00 pm

While PJ and I were in Amsterdam last month, we visited the Rijksmuseum, one of the world’s great museums. The museum’s main building is being renovated, so only small portion of the collection is available for exhibition. What the museum has done, therefore, is put together many if its masterpieces and put them on display in the Philips Wing of the museum. While it would have been nice to see more, seeing these masterpieces were well worth the visit.

We arrived at the museum shortly after it opened, which meant that the line wasn’t too long. We probably only waited in line about 15 or 20 minutes to get our tickets. It was a chilly, wet day, so we were both glad that it didn’t take long to get out of the weather and into the museum.

As the picture above suggests, the most famous work in the Rijksmuseum is Johannes Vermeer’s “The Kitchen Maid,” which is an amazing painting. Here’s an image of the painting featured on the museum’s web site:

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The Safest Place by Sade Friday, Apr 2 2010 

music and song of the week thisgaudygildedstage 2:21 pm

When it came out in early February, I immediately downloaded Sade’s new album, Soldier of Love from iTunes. Lover’s Rock from 2000 is a great album that I still listen to from time to time, so I eagerly looked forward to this new one.

I’ve found the album a little difficult to get into, mostly because I just haven’t had time to really sit with it and just listen. The past two months have been incredibly busy — every time I think my “new” job couldn’t get busier, I’m proven wrong!

While I was working on my laptop recently, however, I had iTunes on shuffle and a track from the album came on, “The Safest Place”:

I really love this beautiful love song. It’s so typical of Sade’s love songs, slow, quiet, and not really very sweet. Instead, she sees love from the perspective of someone who’s seen it all and lived through heartache. Her take on love is always much more interesting than most pop music. This track has made me want to find some time to listen to the whole album and get acquainted with it.

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HotM: Jonathan Swift Wednesday, Mar 31 2010 

Restoration and 18thC Sex and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century 'hotties' and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 1:22 pm

Tomorrow night I am beginning my graduate seminar on Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy by having my students read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. I’m hoping that this text will serve as a useful model for Sterne’s difficult novel.

I’ve taught Gulliver’s Travels before, but this time I’m taking a slight risk. In addition to the usual discussion of politics and the Enlightenment (and Swift’s views on each), I am also emphasizing a reading of the novel based on two essays by Christopher Fox. The first is an article published in EIghteenth-Century Studies in 1986 entitled “The Myth of Narcissus in Swift’s Travels.” The second is a chapter in an MLA volume, Approaches to Teaching Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels entitled “Sexuality and the Body.”

What I’m interested in exploring is the joke early in the text in which Swift brings up masturbation. The joke starts with Gulliver’s mentioning the man to whom he is apprenticed, Mr. Bates. After a few near misses, Gulliver finally calls him “Master Bates.” The question I have is, “Why does Swift begin his text with this joke?” I wonder what function it serves and what connotations are evoked by it. This joke is all the more interesting because the opening paragraphs of Gulliver’s Travels so heavily emphasize the conventions of realist fiction: where Gulliver was born, who his parents are, where he went to college, how old he is, etc. This joke immediately seems to undermine this realism.

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Planning a Tristram Shandy Seminar Sunday, Mar 28 2010 

teaching thisgaudygildedstage 11:36 am

Our spring quarter starts tomorrow, so I’ve been spending some of my spring break planning my graduate seminar on Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, which will meet on Thursday evenings starting this week. This is going to be a vert busy and difficult quarter for me, but I’m really looking forward to teaching this class. I anticipate that it’s going to be the most difficult class I’ve ever taught, but if I can pull it off it’s going to be immensely rewarding.

I’ve taught Tristram Shandy twice before in my honors tutorial classes in 2008 and 2007. In both of these classes, we spent about two weeks rushing through the novel’s highlights. When I last taught it in 2008, I decided that I wanted to spend more time with this book, to challenge myself to really try to come to terms with it (emphasis on the word “try”). So, I decided that I would teach my next graduate seminar on it. What better way to force oneself to get to know a text better?!

As a graduate student I was supposed to read Tristram for a seminar on the eighteenth-century novel. I didn’t enjoy the book at all and was never able to finish it. Now that I’m teaching it to graduate students, I’ve been trying to identify why I disliked it so. My current theory is two-fold. First, I think that the professor didn’t properly contextualize the novel for us. As a class on the novel, we read what one would expect (for the mid-nineties): Oronooko, Roxana, Pamela, Joseph Andrews, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, and then Tristram, which was followed by Humphrey Clinker, Caleb Williams, and probably something by Mary Wollstonecraft or Jane Austen, but I forget now what we ended with.

I now realize that this context only partially prepared us for Sterne’s novel, since the traditional of the eighteenth-century realist novel is only a small part of what Sterne is doing in Tristram. For this reason, I’m placing Tristram Shandy in a different contact by starting this seminar with Jonathan Swift. We’ll begin with Gulliver’s Travels and then read A Tale of a Tub (another text that I didn’t enjoy as a graduate student). I hope that these texts will show my students how Sterne is indebted to Swift’s combination of realism, fantasy, and satire. Like Swift, Sterne draw on the growing conventions of realist fiction in a playful way so that he can comment on and critique a host of cultural, political, and religious issues of his time.

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Fairytale by Alexander Rybak Thursday, Mar 25 2010 

music and song of the week and television thisgaudygildedstage 5:55 pm

While I was in Europe earlier this month, I had limited access to English-language television. The one channel that I consistently had was BBC, so one evening I watched Your Country Needs You, a show hosted by Graham Norton in which 6 acts competed to represent the U.K. in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.

The Eurovision Song Contest is totally fantastic. It’s a cheese fest like no other. Acts from each European country compete by performing an original song (not necessarily written by the act). Each country then votes on the winner. (The voting is slightly more complicated than that; here’s an explanation.)

Near the end of the show, while people in England were voting for the winner, Alexander Rybak, who won the Eurovision competition last year, performed his winning song, “Fairytale.” He’s totally adorable, and I loved the cheesy deliciousness of the song, so I’m making it my song of the week:

The 24-year-old Rybak completed for Norway, where he now lives, but he was born in Belarus. He wrote “Fairytale,” which won the highest number of votes ever recorded in the competition. After winning the competition he released an album featuring the single of “Fairytale.”

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Favorite Albums of 2009 Wednesday, Mar 24 2010 

music thisgaudygildedstage 7:35 pm

I thought I’d take a short break from writing about my recent trip to Europe to catch up another favorites of 2009 list: my favorite albums.

I think I purchased more albums — both CDs and online from iTunes — this year than in the past. Even so, it’s been difficult to list ten albums that I really think were worthy of being on my top ten list. After a few months of listening to them all again, however, I’ve identified ten that I think were the ones I liked the most from 2009.

Number 1: Hold Time by M. Ward

I originally purchased this album for PJ. I knew that he liked She & Him, so I thought he might like to have this album too. I think I ended up liking it more than he did. I love it. It’s definitely my favorite album of 2009. I guess what I like most about it is its folk-pop groove. It’s just a really cool album.

Here’ are my four favorite tracks from the album:

The last track on the album is an instrumental version of “I’m a Fool to Want You,” which is amazingly great.

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Visiting Mauritshuis, The Royal Picture Gallery Tuesday, Mar 23 2010 

museums thisgaudygildedstage 6:20 pm

While I was in Leiden recently, I took the train down to the Hague so that I could visit Mauritshuis, the Royal Picture Gallery. With paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and many others, this museum houses one of the great art collections in the world.

The building was originally a seventeenth-century palace, the home of Count Johan Maurits, who was governor of the Dutch colony in Brazil from 1636 to 1644. While he was governing the colony, he had this house built. When he returned to the Netherlands in 1644, he took up residence here (at least on a part-time basis).

After his death, the house passed on to his descendants. Eventually it became the property of the state. In 1822, the royal collection of paintings took up residence here, where they have hung ever since.

During my visit, one of the museum’s floors was closed to visitors, but the main masterpieces were all still on display. The price of admission also paid for an audio-tour, which was very informative. Usually, I get bored with such tours fairly quickly, but this one was interesting. I thought that all of the information it provided helped me appreciate the art more; I also liked that it gave you the option to learn more or move on after the initial discussion of each painting.

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