For reasons that are still unknown to me, the directors of both of the academic journals of the Romance Studies Department have signed me on as editor to their magazines. Prof. González Espitia is the Editor of Hispanófila, which is in his words: “a journal with a long tradition that for over half a century has published essays on literary, linguistic, and cultural topics dealing with the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking worlds.” For this journal I asses incoming articles for fit with our editorial criteria. It is a very enriching job where I learn a lot from the (to me) anonymous authors and from Prof. Gonzalez Espitia’s experience and wisdom. The other academic journal, Romance Notes is led by Prof. Oswaldo Estrada and is also over fifty years old. For this publication I do the final proofreading to make sure all punctuation, notations, etc. are correct and that the article is ready to publish.
Seeing both ends of the editorial process is very interesting and makes me think about my own hack writing. I did send an article for consideration to a Spanish journal last year, of course it was rejected. But once I settle in on my dissertation, I will try again, this time I will shoot for more journals in order to increase my chance of publication.
Yes, I know I repeat myself all the time, but one of the main reasons I love Chapel Hill is the thriving cultural scene. There is always something culturally stimulating going on. Being at a concert, a play, a ballet, is a great break from the day-to-day but at the same time a very enriching experience, which I believe leaves an almost invisible sediment at the bottom of your soul, mind, heart. This sediment, like in a good wine adds to the richness and flavor of the wine. Among other events this year I went to:
The Pittsburgh Symphony playing Mahler 1 symphony.
Benjamin Britten’s Japanese Noh theatre inspired Curlew River
Unavoidably in December, the Carolina Ballet’s Nutcracker
The Maarinsky Orchestra playing Prokofiev
Kronos Quarter with my dear friend and composer James Brown. This concert included a very nice question and answer period post concert.
Brian Blade, a brilliant jazz drummer with my dear friend and cigar aficionado Jedd.
Britten’s War Requiem
Pierre Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich playing Pierre Boulez on dueling pianos!
Martha Graham Dance Company
The Monteverdi Orchestra playing the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 with Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducting. One of the most amazing shows I have ever seen!
The North Carolina Symphony playing Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring. A great and hopeful hymn that represents the beauty that is America.
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure played by a small company in the local movie theatre!
UNC Opera’s hilarious rendering of Strauss’ Die Fledermaus
UNC Baroque Ensemble’s Fall and Spring concerts with the great Professor Wissick leading.
Unfortunately my Spring was so busy that I did not manage to go to any of the Playmakers Spring productions.
And this does not include lectures, readings, exhibits, nor any of all the more alternative goings on, in which I choose not to participate, one must set limits. All in all an extremely fulfilling year that had me thinking, feeling, laughing and crying.
Last year a couple of our classmates organized a very informal indoor soccer scrimmage on Friday evenings. For some reason I took up the responsibility this year. I booked one of the outdoor fields and had a great time every Friday evening. We were blessed with great weather all through the Fall semester. Basically we allowed anyone who showed up to play. We had a 59 year old Colombian fellow, middle school kids, undergrads and grad students from other departments play, so we re-named our scrimmage: Romance Studies Community Soccer. By opening it up to the community we hope to provide and give back a little bit.
In the winter we moved our games indoor to one of the courts, and by the end of the year, we received official acknowledgement from the department’s Graduate Student Government to legitimize the position and I have passed the baton to a young fellow in the department who did not miss a single game!
This Spring, I was my Thesis Director’s Graduate Research Consultant for her undergraduate Spanish Literature since 1700 survey class!
Prof. Gómez Castellano and I had to apply for this position to the undergrad College of Arts and Sciences, and we got approved. The job entails being a resource to help the students with their research. But since Irene and I were both very excited about this, we took it to the next level. I did a presentation on Goya… at the Ackland museum, who pulled a bunch of their Caprichos prints to show us in their special viewing room. I organized a visit to our specialist librarian, superstar Teresa Chapa to whom I should devote a whole blog post to – and her equally awesome partner in crime Becka, sometimes the three of us just chat in their hidden away office, deep in the inner sanctum of the library, and chat books and gossip. But back to this Graduate Research Consultant business. Basically it is a great opportunity for me to be immersed in an undergrad lit class. I was there to help, but at the same time I learnt a lot from the experience.
The class was a full 19 students, which is a lot for a higher level lit. class, but the more the merrier!, a big class at this level is also a very healthy sign for the department, and for the major and minor in general.
Technically there is no need for me to go to class – the pay is very low and I am only payed to work X amount of hours (I don’t even know how many), but I love the class and I learn so much from my Thesis Director that I went to all the classes anyway. Of course some of the students did use me as a research resource and met with me to go over their work, which was very interesting and fun work.
The experience is highly recommended, I hope to do it again.
Since I arrived at UNC, every time I bumped into the Director of French Studies – which was often because she is a keen supporter of the North Carolina Symphony which I also follow (although not as keenly), I would always offer my services to her as a French teacher. Little did I know that one day she would offer me to teach a section of French 105, French for High Beginners, i.e. students that have had previous exposure to French but are too rusty to go into intermediate level.
I cannot lie, my French grammar – which was never my strong suit to begin with – was, was, hmm, rusty. But my course coordinator who also happens to be my desk neighbor in our office had fantastic Power Point presentations covering the grammar.
French came to me later in life. I started taking classes in high school in London, which were complemented with great summers at the International Teen Camp in Lausanne in French Switzerland. I continued taking classes during university and spent those summers working in Paris, Bordeaux, Lausanne and Geneva, taking classes in the evenings and immersing myself.
After that I worked for a stint for a French stockbroker in Madrid, and tried to practice as much as possible with friends and work colleagues.
More recently, for my studies I have loved revisiting Montesquieu, Voltaire and other 18th C French authors.
So my speaking and reading are fine, but I struggle with the writing, due to the grammar, so teaching was not a total shock, and I compensated with total immersion from the music video to welcome the class to using only French all the way to the end of the session. The mix of students was as good as anyone could ask for. From quiet and shy overachievers, to frat bros, (to continue perpetuating stereotypes) to the whole demographic. I believe this always makes for more enriching classes. Our classroom in the Urban Planning Department building was nice and cozy and coincidentally had a massive wall sized reproduction of an antique map of Paris!
A page of my dissertation after my boss is done with it, I love it!
Affogato
Ronald and Jafar
My office mates
My Thesis director, a classmate and Fray Gerundio!
Spring in UNC
Within the last month I finished my third year of my PhD studies and Chapter 2 of my dissertation, so I finally got to updating my poor abandoned blog, only to have the Greek internet swallow the blog post I have been writing for the last 10 days (more on that later), as if it were a multi-billion Euro loan from the European Central Bank. So, back to the old drawing board.
My sixth semester has been very intense. All semesters are intense, but in different ways. This was my first semester dedicated 100% to writing my dissertation and it was a new dynamic for me. I find writing, especially in the academic style very difficult, every sentence is a challenge, and then it gets corrected by my director and sent back for retooling. So it feels like one step forward two steps back. But eventually every page gets cleared after a few drafts, so it is very rewarding to make progress.
My volunteering has also been very exciting. The volunteer coordinator at the Ronald McDonald House of Chapel Hill asked me to participate in their Annual fundraising gala, this year the theme was Disney’s Aladdin… and I was Jafar! They were nice enough to let me keep the costume so I re-used it for the Romance Studies end of the year party, which this year was themed as “Happily ever after” i.e. your favorite storybook character.
Other highlights of the year to which I will dedicate blog posts were:
Being a Graduate Research Consultant for my Thesis Director’s undergraduate literature class.
A plethora of cultural events: music, ballet, theater…
The French Department had me teach French for High Beginners. It was a challenge but also great fun.
I was the Department’s soccer coordinator for the year, or as I re-worked it: The Romance Studies Sports and Wellness Coordinator.
This Spring I presented at a conference at the University of Maryland and at our own home grown Carolina Conference on Romance Studies.
All this and more will be coming your way soon, so stay tuned!!!…
Last week was very snowy in North Carolina, we had two days off due to the snow. Here is a pretty video of the campus in the snow. Fortunately it does not show people slipping or cars sliding. People in New England will laugh at this “dusting”, but we enjoyed it – and it allowed me to finish the first chapter of my dissertation, at least a rough draft. Enjoy.
I’m waiting for my Thesis Director to go over my most recent dissertation scribbles, so I take a rare break from writing my dissertation… to write my blog!
Back in the short period between my prospectus (see previous posts) and starting my dissertation, before Christmas, I actually had time to watch a few of films, and I loved them both.
Wes Anderson has been one of my favorites since his Rushmore (1998). I love how he weaves a narrative with all these eccentric, maybe a little bit broken, chipped characters. His latest is The Grand Budapest Hotel, about the concierge (Ralph Fiennes) in an old school grand hotel somewhere in Mitteleuropa. The humor is woven into the narrative, sometimes with a big old slapstick brush, sometimes with a nuanced, detailed, subtle touch, and of course the whole spectrum in between. I have been known – back in the day, to have gotten kicked out of movie theaters for laughing when nobody else laughed, because I caught some tiny wink of humor. Wes Anderson keeps doing that for me time and again. Although nowadays I fortunately do not get kicked out of theaters.
When we were kids I remember spending summers at a place like that, the Gran Hotel Camp de Mar (which is now a gaudy monstrosity). Talk about old school. I even remember when one of the guests died and it was all hush-hush, but not really. So it really struck a chord with me, remembering the grand old dining room, the old furniture, everything.
Within the arc that is the narrative of the story, every detail of every scene is perfect. Every character, every costume, every prop, every line, you name it, it is perfect. Which of course contrasts beautifully with the eccentric, maybe a little bit broken, chipped characters.
Wes Anderson is, of course, building on the shoulders of giants, particularly those of Woody Allen. I did get all caught up on his three latest movies (that is how behind I was on my movie watching): Midnight in Paris (2011), From Rome with Love (2012), and Blue Jasmine (2013).
Cate Blanchett (who was also brilliant in Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, 2004) nails her Jasmine. The film really got me thinking about how we delude ourselves, and how we see people around us that fool themselves to amazing depths and do not want to acknowledge it. From Rome with Love was fun, and I was happy to see Allen reprise Penelope Cruz in this film. But it was Midnight in Paris that I enjoyed the most. The magic of 1920s Paris in the 21st Century, Owen Wilson, who is also in the Grand Hotel Budapest (Adrien Brody is also in both). Maybe it is because I lived in Paris for a summer and inevitably fell in love with the city, maybe because it has one of Woody Allen’s best narratives in a while. Whatever, it was magic.
Last fall I was privileged to teach Spanish at a Kindergarten and Lower School in Durham, the next town over, where that other university is.
Southpoint Academy is the school where my Course Coordinator of last semester sends her son. They needed a Spanish teacher on Thursdays – my day off last semester, and although I was a little nervous at first, I soon fell in love with the kids.
I taught three sections of half an hour each. The Kindergarten class with 17 5 year old students, then a 1st and 2nd grade class with 12 students aged between 6 and 7, and a 3rd and 4th grade class with 9 students aged 8 and 9.
Our classes were very intense and we had a great time learning Spanish! I loved the diversity and enthusiasm of the children! The school is conveniently located across the street from the mall, so after class, if I had time, I enjoyed having lunch and walking around the mall! Another great incentive if the weather was nice was to ride old Rocinante! It was only a fifteen minute ride, but it is better than nothing.
Unfortunately this semester I received an assistantship from the university to be a Graduate Research Consultant for my Thesis Director’s undergraduate literature class, so I had to give up my teaching at Southpoint.
For those of you not familiar with the oldest public university in the US, here is a short clip of what Autumn looks like (sorry its a bit late). PS: At minute 1:52 you can see, on the left, the grey spire of the church across the street from your Chapel Hill home. Enjoy!
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