short bloggery from work

after my two days at the temple of israel, taping a middle east conference, running down the secret passageways and copying the tapes before the speakers themselves had gotten downstairs with the dodgy elevator, the return to class felt strange. our reading list was particularly insane this week, as it included most of t.s. eliot’s major poems. i compared the intense layers of religious references to the wild layering on buffy, meaning to say that one could make annotated editions of every major text, but they should at least be enjoyable on their own. my professor thankfully pulled the rug from under my feet, saying that not every text is as ridulously referency as eliot or buffy. we ended up mainly talking about the shortest, the hollow men (the “this is the way the world ends” one) and my ‘huddle of praying zombies’ interpretation was surprisingly popular, even though my awful pun ‘the hum of humanity’ was way too pretentious to even repeat here. more poetry next week; wallace stevens who apparently wrote his crazy poems on the way to work as an insurance person in hartford, connecticut.
my other professor, who used to write for rolling stone, the one i still owe two papers (even though we’ve been avoiding the subject), really liked the flaky mix me and g. put together for our twice-semesterly, mainly gin-oriented cocktail party, but then again who can resist petula clark singing “downtown” in german, or a tragic tango version of “smells like teen spirit.” the weirdest thing about this internship is the soundtrack, for weeks now i have spent two days a week listening to mid-nineties alternative music (today is massive attack and portishead, yesterday brought radiohead and placebo, last week it was the verve and depeche mode.) songs i only purposely put on to flashback and reminisce, never to concentrate when i’m writing a four page synopsis on an epic young adult novel about flooding and cloning.