• The most affecting photo I've seen in a very long time, by a Joao Silva. It appeared on the front page of the New York Times on October 10th,
the caption "An Iraqi boy peered Tuesday inside a car that was towed to a Baghdad police station after two women inside were killed." Can we ever atone for the crime of this war?• A talk by Alan and Susan Raymond (Monday night), among the most influential documentary makers in the US, discussing, among other things, the making of "An American Family" in 1973, the first "reality television" show (the Raymonds spent most of a year with the Loud family in Santa Barbara,
and turned out to be there for a divorce and one son's coming out), and the "craft and ethics" of documentary film-making• The presentation to the Faculty Senate (Tuesday morning) of the latest plans for the "signature building" to be erected on Fifth Avenue, visionary but still substantially unfunded
• A profile of a homeless man who was set on fire by hoodlums last week and died a few days later from the burns
• Assorted thoughts on the different aims of the liberal arts and writers/performers, both as students and as faculty, crystallized by a chat with my colleague M over beer in the garden at 265 (Tuesday evening)
• The well-made new documentary "The Bible Tells Me So," about the Bible and homosexuality in America (Wednesday afternoon), which I attended with a first-year class on Queer Culture - a film I wouldn't have gone to see otherwise, expecting it to be old news and old slanders, but I'm glad I went, it's beautifully made (except for a silly cartoon in the middle, for which I blame Michael Moore), sensitive and even-handed (though obviously on the side of the angels)
• An obscure but fascinating talk on "The anthropology of the future" by Arjun Appadurai (Wednesday night), which seemed brilliant while I was there taking notes, but collapsed into obscurity in retrospect.
I did learn from the talk of a brilliant essay by Naomi Klein in this month's issue of Harper's Magazine on "disaster capitalism."• Class discussion of Calderon's magnificent Life is a Dream (La vida es sueño), a play of such complexity and intelligence that one could easily spend weeks on it (yesterday afternoon).
• The dutiful but unBrechtian production of Brecht's Life of Galileo at NYU (last night), three hours and twenty minutes without catharsis or the Brechtian anti-catharsis. The production predictably suggested parallels between the Catholic Church in Galileo's day and the religious right and Bush administration in our own, but timidly and in a way which missed the complexity and challenge of the play. Brecht said that when the house-arrested Galileo slips a copy of his latest work to an estranged disciple in the last scene, it should seem to the audience as if he's passing on the blueprint for the Hydrogen Bomb, but in this production it was just the innocent joys of science unjustly persecuted by the church... Discussing it later with students we concluded that the way to make this play current would be to focus on global warming, not just as a "scientific fact" denied by Republicans, but as a phenomenon caused in large or small part by the fruits of science.
All of this, needless to say, on top of preparing for classes, reading endless student response papers, strategizing with C about our "Religion and Theater" classes, attending committee meetings (two Tuesday, Thursday, and another in a few minutes today), taking first year instructors to lunch to discuss their classes (Monday and Wednesday), and a long interview on the problem of student attrition with the school newspaper... After a year's leave I'd forgotten that things just keep on coming, accumulating, piling up. So far I'm keeping my head up but it's exhausting! Not that I'm complaining. Every one of the things I didn't get around to describing was rewarding!