Other Spaces

 As I mentioned earlier, yesterday was an emotional day, mainly in a wonderful way, but also more than a bit elegiac. Yesterday I emptied out my office. Everyone knows I'm retiring - and I'm filling out a lot of related paperwork - and there have already been two retirement parties - but seeing the desk sitting there cold and depersonalized carried a dreadful finality. Every time I've sold a house over the years and I walked out of it for the last time, I've always thought back to an early Japanese poem, which says (I may be paraphrasing): "Someday someone else will celebrate the Festival of Dolls in your house." That is, your house is your home because of the people, your loved ones, who are in it. I reflected upon that yesterday when I looked at my desk, a desk that could be used by literally anybody next year - sitting in an office that could be used by literally anybody next year. Any remnant of who I am and how hard I worked and what I accomplished will dissipate in a few months, if it lingers that long. I told Janet that one of the strangest things about retirement so for is that for the first time in over forty years I don't have another space. When I was in graduate school at UC, I shared the history graduate TA office and even managed to carve off an unused office for my own purposes when I ended up teaching a year-long large western civilization class. I did the same thing when I was teaching adjunct classes at Franklin College while I was finishing my dissertation. During my nine years at Georgia Perimeter College I had two offices.  Throughout twenty-nine years at Champlain I've had six offices (one in Joyce, one in the library, three in Aiken, and finally one in Wick). I even had offices when I taught in India and the UAE. When I was offered the job at Hong Kong University they went out of the way to show me my office and where my staff would be. The point being that I always had a separate secondary space, and now I don't. For some reason I find that very unsettling. I'm very happy at home, certainly much happier than I've been for the vast majority of those forty years, but you get used to the existence of those other spaces and the freedom they represented.

I'll still pop in throughout the end of June. It's a nice space to sit and write when I'm up in Burlington, and, of course, to spend time with any of my friends who are around. However, soon all too soon, the buildings won't recognize the card swipe (stupid metaphor, working overtime)

Movies in 2026 167

 

The Idle Class (Charlie Chaplin, 1921)

Now that I've entered the idle class, or at least the more idle class, it seemed an oddly well-timed moment to watch Charlie Chaplin's 1921 film The Idle Class. I didn't choose the film for that reason, but life has an odd sense of humor. Chaplin played two roles, the Little Tramp and a generally tipsy upper class wanker, while his long-standing co-starred Edna Purviance played the wife of the latter and mistaken love interest of the former. It's not nearly my favorite Chaplin film, although I liked it. Recommended.

A Microcosm

 Last night I was blessed to have dinner with a couple of my all-time favorite students, Maeve and Ronan. They knew I was retiring, and they wanted to take the opportunity to grab dinner and get caught up. They make up a tiny microcosm of the six-thousand students I taught over the decades, but I will happy take them as stand-ins for the rest. It was an emotional day, and getting to finish it with these amazing young people was a gift.

Besides being great students and folks heading out into very promising careers, they were also two of the folks who founded the non-profit to support the refugee school in Jordan. They are exactly the reason why I did what I did for so may years.

Movies in 2026 166

 

The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)

After watching Christian Nyby's (or Howard Hawks's) original 1951 The Thing From Another World last week, last night I was able to re-watch John Carpenter's 1982 version The Thing. Janet had forgotten that we had watched it a couple years ago, but about five minutes in the memories began to kick in. As I've stated previously, I think both versions are fantastic, although obviously in very different ways. I knew that they were both based on John Campbell's 1938 novella Who Goes There?, but I assumed that the 1951 film was probably closer to the novella, whereas Carpenter had gone rogue. However, a little research indicated that actually Carpenter's version is closer to Campbell's story. I just downloaded Campbell's story on my Kindle, so I'll be better positioned to add to this commentary soon. It could just be that in 1951 Nyby/Hawks figured that America needed a happier ending than Campbell wrote, especially since a creature which could imitate anything to go unnoticed might have seen as a direct commentary on Communism (and, who knows, maybe that was Campbell's original intent - I'll check back soon on that one). Anyway, both The Thing From Another World and The Thing are highly recommended - and thanks to the Criterion Channel for the doubleheader.

A local cartoon from this week's Seven Days, which gives you a sense of how Carpenter's version has entered the cultural lexicon.

Buon Natale

 And here's another shot from Venice, which was waiting patiently on my phone for some attention. It's not a great picture, but it made me happy nonetheless. 

It boggles the mind that we'll be celebrating the holidays in Sicily next year.

That Would Have Helped

 I stumbled across this picture the other day, and decided to finally get around to posting it. The odd thing is that I had already saved it to my laptop's desktop, so it's not as if my phone randomly decided to remind me of something that I had somehow forgotten. Essentially, I'm not very efficient at getting things posted to my blog. I'm up for 3400 posts, but there are times when I feel that there are another thousand pictures or stories patiently waiting in the queue. This picture is only a year and a half old, as compared to ones that I snapped two decades ago which are still floating in the ether. On our first trip to vaporetto (the water taxi that conveys folks up and down the Grant Canal in Venice, which I inevitably call the velociraptor) we were only planning on heading up three or four stops, but didn't really understand the logistics; essentially, we were curious to how many stops were on the route and when they would turn around and head back. We were also wondering why there was no sign on the vaporetto that would provide that information. Anyway, we decided to blow by the Rialto Bridge and figure out for ourselves. About the time that we entered open water we understood our mistake. Plus, they weren't planning on turning around, but instead were making a long circuitous route. And, of course, there was no restrooms. By the time we reached where we had climbed on originally (our in front of the Metropole, where we were staying), we asked if we could just stay on for the three stops to get to our original intended location - only to have the guy explain that they were going to turn around and head the opposite direction. Beyond having to pay for another trip, Janet also had to use the restroom - so she jumped off the water taxi and ran back to the Metropole. It was sort of a metaphor for our entire series of misadventures on that first trip to Venice.

Anyway, the next day we climb back on the water taxi and the captain picked up the sign and hung it for all to see (which the previous day's captain have never gotten around to doing). So,, now we have it figured out. Once we're settled in Venice we'll head back to Venice several times, and hopefully avoid being such rubes in the future.

Movies in 2026 165

 

Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)

For some inexplicable reason, I had somehow never seen Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris. I certainly wasn't ducking it, and I've liked the other films of his that I've seen (Mirror, Stalker). Anyway, I found got around to watching Solaris, and I will doubtless be watching or re-watching his other films (happily, the Criterion Channel has a healthy lineup of Tarkovsky films). Like his other films, Solaris is complex and challenging, and at the end you're not quite certain what you just saw, but you're awfully glad that you made the journey. It's science fiction, and the purest form of science fiction, that is, asking difficult questions and not relying upon shallow special effects (that is, US science fiction). Psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) heads to Solaris to figure out why the scientists there are experiences bizarre hallucinations, only to find that his dead wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk) keeps returning from the dead and committing suicide. There's a lot of rumination on memory and loss and meaning, thus classic Tarkovsky. Highly recommended. Mirror and Stalker are back in my queue, along with Tarkovsky films I haven't seen.