The past week has been somewhat blasé with regards both to my classes and my general attitude toward Carleton.

French has been hectic with two oral presentations, an exam, a longish essay, and the six or seven regular daily assignments. The workload has been fine, actually, it's just that my prof (the ridiculously gorgeous one) has been a tad scatterbrained. In the first couple of weeks she was M.I.A. once for illness, and then she was gone two other times for conferences. Other profs filled in, but with little coordination. No one, for instance, even mentioned a test or a paper in class, which would be fine if our moodle site actually had information on either of them. Mais non. Conclusion: ambivalent.

I become slightly more disillusioned with Arnab's professorial style with each class period. Let's have a play-by-play of this week, shall we? We've been reading Rabindranath Tagore's The Home and the World. On Monday, we opened class by making a long list of binary oppositions at play in the novel. Arnie then proceeded to lecture for the rest of the period on the place of women in Indian society in the context of emerging nationalism. We ran out of time without having really touched the novel, and he essentially told us that on Wednesday we would talk about how this lecture applies to the book. What a horrid way to approach literature: it allows for little intellectual exploration. But this is how he guides discussion, more generally, as well. He structures our conversations so rigidly, as if ultimately to prove whatever "suggestion" he has made or will propose. Today's class (mercifully held outside) offers an example of Arnie's other principle flaw as a professor. People will make observations for about five minutes, and then he'll stop and "synthesize" what people have said. The problem is, however, that his is less of a synthesis of what people have said and more of a flash-forward to some grand, utterly totalizing and glib reading. But my issue goes beyond his unpacking of the text for us; I get particularly inflamed when he can't clearly articulate that reading. He self-consciously chides PoCo theory for its legendary impenetrability, and yet he cannot extricate himself from it. He starts blabbing on about sublimated narratives and such like and wonders why people don't get what he's saying. What kills me, though, is that these are rather elementary concepts. All he was trying to say is that good novels (and yes, he was speaking this generally), of which Tagore's is an example, have a dominant narrative and other counter-narratives that challenge that dominant narrative. The novel, through its characters, descriptions, and so on reveals more than one reading. Whoopty fuckin' doo. I don't need to go to a 300-level lit class and have my prof tell me that there are things called sublimated narratives that cause ambiguity. (He also holds our hands through the paper-writing process. We have to consult him if we're making our own topic for a 4-5 page paper because he wants to make sure it's appropriate and has an argument. I'm a senior English major who just finished my comps, and it was fine. I think I'm gonna be fine for a 5-page trifle.)

This doesn't really lead into my next big issue of the week, but oh well. I went to see the SMUT production of My Fair Lady this past weekend and it was, if I may be so frank, the worst production I've ever seen at Carleton. There were a few positive aspects: the woman who played Eliza did well with her singing, acting, and accent; the guy who played Alfred, Eliza's father, played a passable drunk (and he's actually an alum); the guy who played Freddy, whom I know to be an excellent voice student, delivered an outstanding solo; and the woman who played the maid (a very small role), had good physicality, a good accent, and, when she sang, had a pretty (and tuned) voice. Other than that I didn't find much to appreciate. The orchestra was flat and falling apart, the acting was terribly dull and poorly paced (much of the cast lacked variable facial expressions, for instance), the singing was wretched (not loud enough -- i.e. poor engineering with microphones for those who had them -- off-key, off-rhythm, and entirely without spirit. The staging was also exceptionally bad, with stage-hands (some not even dressed in black) awkwardly shuffling on and offstage to change scenes while the scenes were still going on.  The choreography, while simple, didn't bother me at all. It would have been fine it anybody actually performed it correctly, or together, but without even that it just became more painfully evident how lackluster the choreography was. The costuming, while sometimes tasteful, was on the whole notably icky. My personal favorite was when Henry Higgins, the play's paragon of class, struts off to the races in a brown suit (with pants too long for the actor), a black hat, and black shoes. How stereotypically gay of me to say that, but really -- an Englishman of that time period would have noticed (and speaking of time period, others tell me that most of the costumes were 1920s style for a play set in 1912; I didn't notice and that seems a little unfair even to me). I could go on and on about other disasters (esp. the ball-room scene; again representing the epitome of class with dancers running into each other and skipping around as if it were a farce), but I'll only mention one other. Perhaps the greatest irony of this whole production came with the casting of Henry Higgins. If there's one thing the actor of this role must, without a doubt, be sufficient at, it is enunciation -- he's the snarky, snobbish professor of phonetics for godsakes. But apparently that was too much to ask. The performer (who I'm sure is a nice guy) relentlessly overacted, running around the stage madly squawking his outrageous accent without cease. One of the first things we learned in conservatory about acting was that if you feel the need to move when speaking, chances are you shouldn't. And lo, it was bad. At intermission when a good proportion of the audience vacated, I told myself I'd stick it out to the end. But then it started again, and it was even worse (Col. Pickering was a joke of a singer...not just tone deaf and rhythmically challenged, but several tones and several beats away from the orchestra at any given moment). I had to leave.

I don't mean to prattle on like this, ripping the poor production to shreds, but I do it for a reason other than simply to play the powerful and pitiless critic. I do it because for the couple of hours I sat in Arena Theater I felt like I was attending a dramatization of the Carleton experience -- a microcosm of the Carleton condition. Holy shit that sounds grand. What I mean is that My Fair Lady is a demanding musical. It's long, it requires crystal clear accepts, comic timing, strong singers, etc. This is not something to be pulled off within the space of 10 weeks. But I feel like so often we are biting off more than we can chew, and excusing our mediocrity by shining our badges of liberal arts education. In my experience this goes for many aspects of Carleton student life. Classes are an obvious starting point. We have fewer than 10 weeks to cram in as much as we possibly can. I have such fond memories of stuffing Moby-Dick down my throat in about 1.5 weeks, then having 2 days to compose a thoughtful, polished essay on the damned thing. I also recall reading two of Shelley's immensely difficult plays ("theatre of the mind"...too dense to really be staged, except perhaps by the avant garde) and the other Shelley's Frankenstein within the space of a single week at the end of the term. What can you possibly say about Prometheus Unbound in 65 minutes? How can you fully explore in Melville's masterpiece in 10 days? And what about the ENGL 110 atrocity I've heard of in which the entirety of Paradise Lost is assigned for one or two class periods? It's not even worth picking up the damned book if that's the way we go about it. And what about the culture of perfectionism that plagues us? There's no time for revision of writing, for full development of thought, so we expect ourselves to produce perfect papers the first time around, and when we get to comps we have internalized the notion that revision is bad. Although I lack the time and energy to provide further examples (or even to make this ramble concise and eloquent enough to sound impassioned), I think this applies broadly to other aspects of student life. From my limited experiences and various discussions with other students, campus activism is mostly a joke. The music program is sad and uninspiring (except for some a capella ensembles). Student theater, while often decent, is rarely impressive. It is, in short, immensely difficult to produce anything of quality here, and to me this mode of learning is frustratingly shallow.

I have a lot to thank Carleton for, of course, but right now I'm feeling rather cynical.

Peace.