It was a very techno weekend, between the Aperture (library of photos took about 12 hours to copy over to the new app), the iPad (which is here at work with me now - the only thing that would have gotten more of an adoring response from my co-workers would be a puppy) and watching streaming Netflix.
Netflix streams a treat on the iPad. Perversely, I chose to watch a 1977 film, The Consequence, West German, black-and-white, digitized from a somewhat battered print. There's something pleasantly antique about old film reanimated by digital tech, whether it's The Consequence with high contrast, glare and fuzz, or something like The Gleiwitz Case, an East German film from 1961 sharp enough to match against still photography of the period. (The Consequence is very intimate, The Gleiwitz Case arctic, each worth seeing.)
And on to Saturday night.
I also have Netflix streaming on my TV, via a Roku box (Rok-you? Rok-oo? Anybody know?). I was curious to see if Roku had added anything nifty to their channel selection, came across CNDTwo, which features among other things, recorded lectures from Yale University.
I didn't go to an Ivy, don't think I've stepped foot on an Ivy campus except for a single afternoon's wander 'round Vassar, and I've always been curious to see what a lecture at one would be like, compared to my experience at New College at Hofstra University.
I chose "Amy Hungerford English 291 the American novel since 1945 video 12
Thomas Pynchon on the crying of lot 49 Yale University."
I wasn't impressed by the beginning of the lecture, identifying two ideas of the novel, as self-contained universe or as socially engaged artifact, but I understood that this was part of introducing these relative tyros, Eli or not, to the lit in some organized manner.
I was downright dismayed, tho', by several historical omissions and errors on the part of the lecturer. She correctly identified several acronyms of the period, but admitted not knowing what FSM stood for. It stands for Free Speech Movement, an essential precursor to SDS and other radicalizing political groups. Seemed odd to me that she wouldn't have researched that. Similarly she gets the slogan "Turn on, tune in, drop out" wrong. And last she identifies what's known as the Gulf of Tonkin resolution as authorizing American bombing of Cambodia, mistaking the completely unauthorized attack on that country with the earlier, somewhat authorized escalation of attack on Vietnam. (This last easily excused as a memory hiccup of the sort that anybody could have. I bet you it's correct in her notes.)
More than feeling that the lecturer had messed up, this sharpened my understanding that the life I've lived is now history. This history was my life. Its truth, lies and shibboleths come readily to my mind because I lived the making of their memory.
At this point I was watching just because I wanted to see the lecture through. I'm glad I did. Hungerford clearly loves and knows the book as book. She made an easy job of explaining how Oedipa adopts the familiar roles available to women at the time (wife, mother, daughter) in order to infiltrate a previously closed world, and drops the F-word gently upon the heads of her fairly unresponsive listeners, perhaps to soak in later (F-eminism). She pointed out motifs such as tears without turning a novel into an exercise in "Where's Oedipa?" Her pleasure in the book's giving and withholding of meaning, and the very fine tuning of its final call, was evident.
At lecture's end, I didn't come to the conclusion that, based on this sample, enlightenment at the Ivies is anything special and wonderful, but I am curious to watch some more CNDTwo lectures. Just exactly what does Hungerford make of Black Boy?
I am enjoying all this tech right now. There's a danger of mistaking mastery of tech, especially something super-shiny as the iPad, for actual accomplishment. But I spent the weekend engaged with some of the best of human culture, and continued making efforts to add some small share.
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