Comedy, tragedy, and the start of my sabbatical

It's the first day of classes and my colleagues are busy teaching, but I'm in the library doing a little research. Yes: this is the official start of my spring semester sabbatical! Which is a good thing, because I would be totally unprepared to teach classes today since I only got back in the state yesterday.

Snow and gray skies met us as we crossed the mighty Ohio River, and I mourned the sunshine we left behind. It's not so much that I want to live in Florida full-time--I don't--but Ohio is not at its best in the bleak midwinter, when the dominant color is gray and the woods look cold and lifeless.

So I'm enjoying sitting in my favorite library under the sunny yellow light and pursuing the light of learning. I'm excited about my sabbatical projects, including one great opportunity that arose out of the blue. Here's what I'll be working on for the next six months:

• Revise and resubmit the big garbage essay.
• Research post-9/11 literature for two purposes: to expand a conference paper into a publishable article, and to prepare for the capstone class I'll teach on the topic next fall.
• Take a research trip to New York!
• Edit a collection of essays on Teaching Comic Texts, part of the MLA Options for Teaching series. 

That's a lot of work but I'm always happier when I'm busy, and the variety of projects will prevent me from becoming bored. I hadn't planned on doing the MLA collection but it arose at a good time and it fits in well with what I've done before and how could I say no to an opportunity to write and edit essays about comedy? (I'll be posting a link to the Call for Papers very soon--stay tuned!)

So I get to spend a semester pursuing some of my deepest interests--how literature helps us make sense of garbage, trauma, violence, and disaster--and when that starts feeling too heavy, I can switch over to reading and writing about teaching comedy. (Tragedy and comedy have a lot more in common than you might think, but if I switch too quickly between the two, I'm likely to get whiplash.)

Artificial sunshine in the library

All the colors of the sunrise

This morning I kept trying to capture a certain shade of silvery green, a sheen that arose on the smooth surface of the water for a brief moment just before the wave transformed itself into a curling, swirling smash of silvery-white bubbles. 

I failed, of course. I took more than 100 photos but I can't find that hue in any of them. I see a multitude of greens and blues, some soft pale pinks and lavenders, and a sky on fire with orange and yellow, but that silvery-green color washed away, just as my memory of it will fade with time. Even now I feel it slipping back into the vast undifferentiated sea of sensation where the color will lurk, unnoticed and forgotten, awaiting the right moment to surge to the surface again.

The only way to find that transient shade, I think, is to keep going back to the beach, where the sunrise explodes into a riot of shifting colors. Who could possibly paint them all? 

If it's Monday, this must be Cocoa (or vice versa)

We've been on the road (and on the beach, on and off) for a week with another two and a half days to go, and my car shows it: sand on the floormats, random flotsam bouncing around the backseat, miles piling up. Likewise my brain: lots of impressions just don't seem to fit into any coherent narrative. Such as:

• A rainy-day visit to a botanical garden revealed the existence of Road Kill Cactus, Jelly Bean Plant, Mouse Trap Tree, and Dragon Bones. Also moorhens! And a lovely purple blossom called Princess Plant.
• That was the same day we took a drive up to Tarpon Springs, where we looked at sponge-fishing boats and watched a video showing historical methods by which Greek immigrants gathered and sheared sponges. Today the sponge docks exist to sponge and shear tourists. It was a fun and colorful way to spend a windy, gray day, and the Greek food made my taste buds sing. 
• Later we sat on the observation deck at our hotel and ate rich desserts while watching a very impressive storm sweep in across the Gulf of Mexico. The first raindrops fell just as we ate the final bites. Perfect timing!
• At today's lunch we sat on a different rooftop and watched an osprey fly by carrying a freshly caught fish. Here's an idea for a new restaurant chain: fresh seafood delivered by ospreys straight to your table. (Ignore the claw-marks.)
• It is a tremendous luxury to have easy access to so much fresh seafood, one we will miss when we return to Appalachia. You'd better believe I'm taking advantage of every opportunity. Is it excessive to eat seafood four days in a row? 
• I think I laughed for three solid hours yesterday while visiting with some old high school friends. We may be getting older, but we're definitely getting funnier. (Not funnier looking. Present company excepted.)
• I've never spend much time on the Gulf coast, so last week in Clearwater I struggled to adjust to the fact that turning right on the beach took us north; now we're on the Atlantic coast and everything is back where it ought to be--right is south, left is north, and if we get up early enough we can see the sunrise over the water. 

And then we'll have to pack up our sandals and start heading up the highway toward the cold north, where fresh seafood is mythical and road kill is not a cactus. First, though, I've got to get some more sand in my shoes.

Colorful lichens

Jungly hike at Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's house

Intersecting trees

I just like these roots

Princess flower

moorhen!

Road Kill Cactus

Felt Plant

Jelly Bean Plant

   

Just beachy

"So what do you want to do with the rest of the day?"

"Nothing."

"Sounds good to me."

So that's what we did:  sat in folding chairs under a bright yellow umbrella on Clearwater Beach, reading books and watching the waves come in and wandering up and down to search for shells and birds. On an early-morning walk we found shorebirds scavenging chunks of sponge and a snowy egret walking on snow-white sand, and later we ate lunch on the beach and did some more nothing until thick fog rolled in around 4 p.m. That's about as much nothing as I can handle--at least until tomorrow.

Chunk of conch encrusted with other shells.

Beautiful day!

And then the fog rolled in.

Our cute and cozy hotel.

 

Plan 9 meets Wakanda

I don't know whether it was a mistake to watch Black Panther and Plan 9 from Outer Space back-to-back on New Year's Eve, but it was certainly enlightening. Both films feature characters using advanced technology to reanimate the near-dead or recently-dead, but in Plan 9, it's never entirely clear what purpose it serves. I mean, sure, it's spooky to see Vampira wandering around a dark cemetery waving her scimitar-like fingernails in a futile attempt to look ghoulish, but I kept expecting to see the Scooby-Doo crew come whipping around the corner to unmask her--or, more likely, scare her away with one woof.

Only an idiot would send Scooby into Wakanda. One glare from the Black Panther's warrior women and he'd be toast.

I tried but failed to find other similarities. In fact, seeing the films back-to-back only intensified their differences:

Production budget
Black Panther: $200,000,000, every sparkling dime visible onscreen.
Plan 9: $60,000, although it's hard to see where the money went since most of the work seems to have been done by a third-grader equipped with blunt scissors and Elmer's glue.

Memorable settings
Black Panther: Wakanda forever!
Plan 9: (1) Airplane cockpit made from refrigerator boxes; (2) dark cemetery full of flimsy cardboard gravestones; (3) flying saucer that's saucer-shaped and shiny while flying but, on the ground, appears to be a stucco square.

Editing and continuity
Black Panther: Flawless, or else all the flaws are well hidden. That scene where they suddenly burst through the invisible barrier into Wakanda? Smooth and stunning.
Plan 9: Scenes shift with all the subtlety of a toddler running face-first into a glass door. One example: Someone discovers a couple of dead gravediggers in a dark cemetery and calls the cops, who lumber slowly into their police car, have trouble executing a turn, and then race awkwardly toward the cemetery in broad daylight, arriving at a cemetery swathed in darkness. That's not how light works in the real world, folks.

Arms and the man
Black Panther: Vibranium spears! Ring blades! Armored rhinoceroses! Ulysses Klaue's prosthetic arm, which can cut glass or blast cars to smithereens with equal ease!
Plan 9: Um, Vampira's claws? The aliens have some kind of ray gun that brings the recently dead back to life for no clear reason, but the ray gun has a tendency to jam, especially when wielded by a woman. Further, all the police officers on Earth appear to have graduated from the Barney Fife School of Gun Safety and Panic Management. I mean, it's one thing to wave guns toward other officers in a cavalier fashion, but when one detective uses his gun to scratch his own head with his finger on the trigger, you have to wonder whether there's any intelligent life on this planet.

Roles for women 
Black Panther: Scientists, social workers, fierce warriors entrusted with protecting the king--and hey, anyone who can halt a rampaging rhinoceros with a single look gets my respect.
Plan 9: (1) Vampira; (2) one female alien who barely speaks, can't manage her ray gun, and suffers an emotional collapse when things get hairy; (3) one pretty little wifey whose sole purpose is to run screaming around a dark cemetery while wearing a frilly pink negligee.

Costumes
Black Panther: Colorful textiles! Sleek embroidered tunics! Armor stylish enough to wear on the red carpet!
Plan 9: Trenchcoats, seriously? The supreme leader of the space aliens wears an ill-fitting tunic adorned with an image of some sort of medieval weapon. And let me tell you this: there's not enough shiny purple satin in the world to make Dudley Manlove look threatening.

Plot holes
Black Panther: No one survives a fall from so great a height.
Plan 9: The entire existence of Bela Lugosi in this film is inexplicable, but that's only one plot hole in a film that is more hole than plot. Okay, the space aliens have been contacting Earth's leaders for a while but we don't understand their alien language until we develop an instant translator, but then when the bumbling Barney Fifes finally come face-to-face with the aliens, they speak perfect English. (But they still don't make much sense!)

Memorable dialogue
Black Panther: "If you say one more word, I'll feed you to my children!...I'm kidding, we're vegetarians."

Plan 9: "In my land, women are for advancing the race, not for fighting man's battles."

Black Panther: "We must find a way to look after one another, as if we were one single tribe."
Plan 9: "Why is it so important that you want to contact the governments of our Earth?" --"Because of death. Because all of you on Earth are idiots...Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!"

Black Panther: "Just bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships, 'cause they knew death was better than bondage."
Plan 9: "Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!"

And that, my friends, is my final word on the matter. 

A smooth ride into 2019

Something is definitely wrong on this road trip: nothing has gone wrong. On Sunday we made it from Ohio to my brother's house in North Carolina in record time with no traffic jams or delays, even on the notoriously headache-inducing I-40 near Raleigh, and then today we drove south on I-95 through Savannah without a single stoppage. That's right: on the section of interstate that often resembles a parking lot, where we brace ourselves for the inevitable section of stop-and-go traffic with no perceptible cause, we went flying through at (slightly above) highway speed without a pause.

Of course we still have a week's worth of travel ahead of us, so there's plenty of time for everything to go cattywampus. For now, though, we're enjoying a smooth ride from the damp, frigid north into the sunshine, with side trips to see birds and alligators. (And a few family members too.) I just hope the rest of 2019 goes this smoothly. 

Happy New Year to all!

Glossy ibis

Ring-necked duck, a first for me

All smiles!

A whole mess o' coots

Tricolor heron!

Snowy egret

Our bed-and-breakfast in Georgia

How about a boat ride?

At Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge

A flock of wood storks

The view from our balcony