No country for old “Alexandra” (2007)

Don’t laugh: I really did intend to watch a wintery film, but was misled by the poster for Alexandra by Russian director Alexander Sokurov. Turns out, that bleak whiteness on the DVD cover wasn’t supposed to invoke a Russian winter but a stiflingly hot summer on the front of the Second Chechen War. Not that I’m complaining, as it turns out this is a terrific, surreal film that could be the female equivalent of No Country For Old Men, except without the Coens’ violence/black humor nexus. It follows Alexandra as she travels out to the front to see her grandson, Denis, now a captain at a depressing military barracks. Occasionally the film offers an anti-war message — certainly it takes a dim view of that War that began in 1999 and continues today, not unlike the U.S.’s own endless Afghan War — but its goals go further and deeper. It’s deceptively slow, poetic in its dialogue, utterly compelling. I loved it.

Alexandra Nikolaevna (Galina Vishnevskaya) is a bit at loose ends: her body creaks, her mind wanders, and even though her bully of a husband died two years ago, he seems to have left a void. We first see her being helped slowly, gently into an empty boxcar on the train by heavily armed soldiers, as if she can barely manage the unexpectedness of it all. This is misleading, as she displays a terrific curiosity about everything once she arrives, even as she gets confused. The barracks soldiers are all dirty, slightly menacing, and because it’s so hot they stand about shirtless, rippled with muscles. But they’re so, so young. We watch them as Alexandra does, baffled: what are we to make of these manly children carrying such big weapons? Alexandra’s perpetual scowl begs us to look on these soldiers with strange eyes; it also, occasionally, veers into a childish fascination with brutality. When Denis maneuvers her inside a tank — smelly with oil and metal and the body odor of too many men — she picks up his rifle, positions the butt against her shoulder, and pulls the trigger of an empty chamber. “It’s easy,” she announces, with a sudden sang froid.

Out here in Chechnya, her views of the world get skewed. When she asks the handsome 27-year-old Denis when he plans to marry, he warns her not to get her hopes up. It’s not for lack of women, he confesses frankly. It’s that he’s killed too many people. The other soldiers look on her with a strange mix of disinterest and longing for such a maternal presence. When she trudges down the road a bit to the market run by Chechen women, she has an unexpected meeting of the minds with an elderly woman who operates one of the stalls. Yet even as Alexandra relaxes in her presence and even makes a gesture to the ways that women are always “sisters,” the two women know well how much they are divided by ancient tribal barriers between Russians and Chechens; no sentimental line can ease the anger between those peoples. The film proceeds by using such beautiful contrasts, all swirling around Alexandra’s muddled mind.

Sokurov has explained that this film is about “the eternal life of Russia,” yet what he means by that is clearly quite complex. Is it Alexandra’s worn body, waddling through a minefield with her wheeled shopping cart? Is it the sad hubris of a military dedicated to quashing the rebels in Chechnya? Is it Denis’ hard life contrasted with his gentleness in braiding his granny’s long hair? You can see why this film offers so many pleasures; even more so when I learned afterward the back story of the star actor here: after a long career as a celebrated soprano, Vishnevskaya and her husband Mstislav Rostropovich (a cellist and conductor) were dissidents in the 1970s whose protection of the author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn led to their exile and being stripped of their citizenship; they only returned to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The fact that in her role as Alexandra Vishnevskaya partly symbolizes this Russia makes the film’s messages all the more compounded, ambiguous.

So what will I do without a wintry film to watch? I’m thinking of celebrating this cold day with the 8-year-old girl across the street by reading Joan Aikin’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase or Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. Way back, I remember how the chilliness evoked in those books helped me cool off during hot summers; now I simply want to enjoy the rare Texas cold for the few minutes we’ve got left.

Action against H.R. 3 (abortion/rape)

Dear Representative X,

I am writing to urge you to oppose H.R. 3 (the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act), for which you are currently a co-sponsor, for the following reasons:

1) The bill changes virtually nothing having to do with abortion; because of the Hyde Amendment of 1976, tax funds currently do not pay for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or in cases when the mother’s health or life is at risk. Poor women already pay for their own abortions without federal assistance. The notion that this bill enacts much change is false. The only women affected by this bill are deeply impoverished and have been impregnated by rape or incest, or face serious health problems as a result of their pregnancy.

2) What the bill does accomplish is to radically redefine legal understandings of rape, incest, and risk to a mother’s health or life. It reduces the definition of rape to “forcible” rape—thus dangerously raising the standard of proof for that crime and eliminating statutory rape. Thus, if an impoverished 14-year-old girl is impregnated by her 30-year-old “boyfriend,” she cannot seek federal assistance to get an abortion. The bill limits the term incest to sex with minors; as a result, an impoverished 18-year-old girl raped by her father or uncle is out of luck. It delimits abortions only to those women whose life is at risk rather than those for whom childbirth would seriously damage their health but leave them alive—saddling already impoverished women with serious medical costs at the same time they must mother a newborn. (Thanks to Jill at Feministe for her insights on these issues.)

3) In redefining rape, incest, and risk to a mother’s health or life, the bill has the potential to alter non-abortion related legal understandings of those crimes. Considering that 1 in 6 American women has been raped—and that only 26% of rapes are committed by a stranger—it is radically dangerous for government to limit rape only to provably “forcible” crimes. Likewise, to delimit the crime of incest only to minors has the potential to green-light incest of young women who come of age. Our nation has an epidemic of sexual crimes against women; our government should be making no moves to ease criminal restrictions on those sexual crimes.

4) The bill seeks to impose anti-abortion ethics on entities wholly separate from government:  namely, small businesses, individuals, and private insurers. It contains a stipulation that the federal government can withdraw tax subsidies for small businesses if their private insurance features coverage for abortion (and most private insurers do offer this coverage); likewise, it can withdraw tax benefits from individuals who purchase private health insurance that offers coverage for abortion. All of this appears designed to strong-arm private insurers into ending coverage for abortion; federal government should not be involved in telling private businesses what to believe or how to operate.

5) This bill seriously detracts from the truly important issues affecting the United States right now: namely, an impossibly high rate of unemployment and increasingly troubled state budgets. In fact, the bill only makes conditions worse for some Americans most at risk: those who are already poor, hungry, and under-employed.

As a professor at X University, I have spoken with many young women with histories of abuse and rape—legacies that are nearly impossible to live with. Their feelings of shame and guilt for having been sexually victimized affect them on a daily basis. In short, even with rape and incest laws as currently framed, these young women were too ignorant as a result of their youth, ashamed, or otherwise emotionally victimized to seek help. Because I’ve spoken with such women I find it all the more disturbing that our Republican state representatives would be so eager to make an anti-abortion point that they would come up with a bill as misleading and punitive to impoverished female victims as H.R. 3.

This is not the time to make the law harsher when it comes to policing sexual crimes against women, nor to make conditions remarkably worse for poor women in particular. I beg you to withdraw your co-sponsorship for H.R. 3 and to vote against it if it comes up for a full House vote.

Sincerely,

Feminéma

Read the full text of H.R. 3 here

The cold descends: movies about winter

Living in Texas means never having to be very cold — I can’t remember the last time I really needed to button up my coat or wear a hat. But every once in a while an arctic blast makes its way down the plains and hammers us. This is a problem for those of us who live in houses only designed to stay cool in the summer — and which now feel like Joel and Clementine’s bed in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, dusted with snow and battered by winds. When the wind began to blow in the middle of night on Monday, it was so loud inside my thin-walled little house that it woke me up.

What does this mean for Feminéma? Foremost that I now watch movies late at night covered with a down comforter that is, in fact, so comforting that I risk nodding off. So I’m looking for something that makes the cold into a major theme. It’s too bad I’ve already seen the great Swedish film Let the Right One In, and I’ve promised to wait till the weekend to see the American remake Let Me In. And I’ve already seen the usual snowy suspects — The Shining, A Simple Plan, Groundhog Day, Fargo, The Sweet Hereafter, The Ice Storm, and Affliction. This is clearly one of those viewing moments that requires a Korean, Russian, or Scandinavian film by people who understand the cold. More soon.

Female character flow chart

In case any of you remain unconvinced by my feminist argument that female characters are ridiculously limited onscreen, this should convince you. I love it because as you scan it, you start to realize how many characters simply get sidetracked into stereotype before being allowed to turn three-dimensional. Clicking on the image will take you directly to OverthinkingIt.com, where Shana Mlawski and Carlos A. Hann Commander put it originally — and will allow you to read it more closely and let it blow your mind. It’s not just about Manic Pixie Dream Girls; it’s also the Wet Blanket, Biological Time Bomb, Cutesy Badass, Adorable Klutz…oh my god, Mlawski and Commander should team up with the TvTropes.org people.

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006)

I’m a relative newbie to graphic novels, having read only some of the classics (Ghost World, Persepolis, Maus, The Invention of Hugo Cabret) but even I can see that Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a work of literary brilliance. And I’m still only halfway through. Like one of my other recent favorites, David Small’s Stitches, this is a memoir; Fun Home describes growing up with a mercurial — and, it turns out, mysterious — father who, in addition to teaching high school English (unhappily), helped to run his family’s funeral home, which they called the fun home. Family, death, home: Bechdel tells her story via somewhat conventional panels, not unlike her Dykes to Watch Out For strip that graces many alternative weeklies throughout the US; but don’t be fooled by its familiar format. This story, like the best memoirs, is richly layered with vivid and seemingly arbitrary memories juxtaposed with classical references and terrific insight. She makes it look easy, but it’s not. She had me from the earliest pages, in which she describes one of those quotidian childhood moments: playing airplane with her father, balancing on his feet and pretending to fly:

For Bechdel this evokes the classical myth of Daedalus and Icarus, an analogy she draws out in a graceful way over the course of a few pages even as she notes, “In our particular reenactment of this mythic relationship, it was not me but my father who was to plummet from the sky.” I scanned that image together with the marginal notes by some previous reader of the library’s copy partly because I find it touching when readers react to the text, but also because it somehow underlines how Bechdel signals from the outset that she’s telling an unusual tale. (A few pages later this same reader wrote in the margin, “WHAT?!?” in response to an unexpected revelation.) Her father may have played airplane with his children, but he could also be explosively temperamental — even, at times, a minotaur:

Yet despite that moodiness, his hobbies were the pursuit of perfection in their house, an exacting dedication to renovation and decoration. Her father took extraordinary care to renovate their ramshackle Victorian home into a near-museum of Victoriana, with perfect crystal chandeliers, lace curtains, horsehair fainting sofas. The children had no say in the decoration of their rooms and lived with peeling paint and curling wallpapers for years. In one of the book’s most delightful mini-memories, she recalls combing through a collection of Addams Family cartoons from The New Yorker — but failing to understand the humor, she mistakes it for a cartoon about her own family, since their house seemed so identical and even Wednesday’s gloomy visage seemed nearly identical to Bechdel’s. The trick of telling such a tale via the graphic novel is getting the images and text to dance with each other, to lay out insights and revelations in alternately subtle and brutal ways in the course of telling a story with many conclusions.

More than anything else, that’s what I love about this book so far — those moments when the text diverges from the images and one starts to see that families tell themselves contradictory stories with mixed messages. In some sequences, her text tells a dark story while her images evoke something sunnier — or vice versa. Her seemingly conventional panels can be evocative of high art even as they’re deceptively simple; her text can summon a host of literary references, other narratives, other outcomes. All of this is done in the most efficient manner — the total text in a graphic novel is almost like a haiku compared with the overflow of paragraphs in a traditional memoir — but the takeaway is huge. Bechdel’s own coming-out story — so often a tale of personal triumph in other people’s lives — is only made more complex by her father’s cloaked life, his lockjaw appearance in so many of her images of him, his moody stranglehold over the family.

For this recommendation I’ve got to thank Tamcho, who recommended it and a pile of movie titles, too, under my Best Films and Recent Books lists. (Keep sending them.) Following her lead I’m sending this out as a recommendation to the rest of you.

http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/

“Black Swan” (2010) and perfect girls

“I just want to be perfect,” Natalie Portman’s character Nina explains to her director Tomas (Vincent Cassel), when she defends her gifts as a dancer. Perfect, but she’s not good enough. Honestly, I think that in 100 years when historians look back at the condition of women at the turn of the 21st century, they will use “I just want to be perfect” as the most cutting, accurate articulation of our culture’s contradictions. And when I say this, don’t focus solely on the word perfect — think about the word just as well. It’s a statement that begs for approval from others, assumes an impossible standard, and modestly begs not to be seen as unattractively ambitious. Viewers of Black Swan: get ready to enter our world.

Am I exaggerating? Certainly not for young women like Nina (Portman). Back in 2003 Duke University was rocked by an anonymous letter to the editor of the campus paper that described a woman’s slow loss of confidence during her undergraduate years at Duke. She explained that women undergrads adhered to the ideal of “effortless perfection” — the notion that they should have perfect hair, clothes, weight, grades, and success — demands made all the more impossible because girls must never display the crushing effort required to achieve any of it. They exercised on treadmills for hours to be able to eat pizza later on. They just had to be perfect. The letter led to the usual results (hand-wringing by the Women’s Studies department, denials that there might be a problem) but here’s the thing: this is hardly limited to Duke. The New York Times featured a story in 2007 about high school girls who do everything — and likewise strive to be “perfect” — and still get rejected, crushingly, from colleges. We’ve been bemoaning the diseases of anorexia, bulimia, and other distorted body image issues for more than a generation now; it doesn’t take much to see that thinness is part and parcel of a broader set of demands that likewise have overwhelming psychological effects on girls. Perfect, perfect, perfect. It’s the disease of our time. Is this movie an elaborate metaphor for the experience of girls and young women?

Who’d be more susceptible to this psychic burden than a ballet dancer? The competition, the necessary precision, the need to be beautiful as well as freakishly talented, the toll on one’s body. Portman has famously discussed losing a whopping twenty-plus pounds from her tiny body for the role (“I thought I was going to die,” she explained), a statement that has elicited little sympathy on the part of journalists, who write callous headlines like, “Does Natalie Portman weight loss mean Oscar gold?” No wonder there are so many scenes of her alone, picking at a loose piece of skin or afraid to look in a bathroom mirror, all of it taking place in cold, hard rooms. Want to read a brilliant, almost prose-poem piece on this film? Take a look at Kartina Richardson’s essay at Mirror on Black Swan, women, and bathroom mirrors (I can only admire the flow of good writing). As much as I watched this film with true amazement at what Portman achieved as a dancer for this role, I have a hard time thinking of this as simply a role; it sounds as if the actress herself spiraled down into a kind of method-acting hell. Thank you, Natalie Portman, for speaking candidly about the part’s difficulties, rather than pretend her physical perfection in the part came without effort. We would do well to follow her lead rather than focus on the post-production fact that she gained back the weight and got pregnant with her fiancé, also a dancer.

With all the conflicting expectations, no wonder Portman’s character starts to split in two. Is this because she’s unhealthy or too emotionally fragile, placing too many demands on herself? No, it’s because other people do, too. She’s perfect — the perfect daughter, a perfect dancer — but she’s not sexy enough to be the Black Swan. “When I look at you, all I see is the White Swan,” her director Tomas tells her. “Yes, you’re beautiful, restrained, graceful. Perfect casting. But the Black Swan … it’s a hard fucking job to dance both.” He patronizingly advises her to masturbate — to loosen up, to seduce him and the audience as the Black Swan. Yet when she does, she falls from grace as a perfect daughter; she looks with new eyes at her little-girl bedroom, all pink and white and stuffed animals and a ballerina music box. In the process she starts to see another version of herself on the sidewalk, on the train, in the mirror. It goes without saying that the demands of heightened sexuality don’t loosen her up at all; they start to destroy her. I find it apt and poetic that if you google “perfect girls,” you get a whole list of porn sites.

For all of these reasons I find it impossible to view Black Swan as just a film, or a thriller, or a psycho-sexual melodrama, or as any of the other tidy descriptors used to characterize it. In fact, I find it impossible to view it as a critic — I can’t tell you whether this is a good film or whether Portman deserves the best-actress Oscar because it hits too many of my nerves. I can’t help seeing it as a fractured fairy tale with ingredients stirred in by Carl Jung, the modern modeling industry, and feminists given to telling cautionary tales. Did I “enjoy” watching it? Not in the least. Do I think it’s a historic visual testament to the tolls of Effortless Perfectionism? Oh my god, yes. It’s the return of the repressed, this film. Of course, I also believe that some viewers will be distracted by the lesbian sex scene, and that my views of this film as I’ve framed them here will not be typical. But just you wait: 100 years down the line, this’ll be the film that appears in all those women’s history classes — I can only hope those future female undergrads have found a way out of the psychic prison their forebears experienced.

Surviving long flights: “Micmacs” (2009)

I’ve been doing a lot of flying in the last few months, which I hate, and I’ve discovered the solution: a DVD with subtitles (because planes are noisy) and an utterly distracting, twisting, funny story with actors whose faces you like to look at. Believe me, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs (the full French title is Micmacs à tire-larigot, which translates to something like “nonstop shenanigans”) is what you want. Central character Dany Boon (center below, whose stage name is derived from Fess Parker’s incarnation of the early American Indian-killer Daniel Boone) is delightful: he’s the subtlest of comedians, almost in the vein of a silent great like Buster Keaton, and he’s surrounded by a pretty contortionist (Julie Ferrier, the blonde below), a man eager to regain his place in the Guinness Book for being shot out of a cannon, and a wide range of other characters whose odd skills come in handy. Confession: I will watch anything by Jeunet, and I’m only sorry I can’t take Micmacs with me on my next flight.

Jeunet’s films create little worlds unto themselves — just remember the dark sewers and mad-scientist laboratories of Delicatessen (1991) and City of Lost Children (1995), or the magically bright Paris full of weird eccentrics in Amélie (2001).  One of the things I find almost embarrassingly delightful is Jeunet’s penchant for the twee — teeny props or narrative details that have little to do with the story but create an almost tactile experience of viewing. These never seem cloying or saccharine to me. Think of the actor Dominique Pinon playing a haunting song on a saw in Delicatessen; the man in Amélie who loves to eat the “oysters” from the carcass of a roast chicken; the way the telegraph delivery man insists on skidding his bike on the gravel in A Very Long Engagement (2004); or the way the little-girl Amélie sticks raspberries on her fingertips:

Memories of those twee moments come up for me all the time (and certainly when I eat roast chicken or raspberries), but if such moments fail to entrance you on their own, perhaps Micmacs will appeal for its story of a man who decides to foil two competing czars of the armaments industry. It’s a tale too convoluted and unexpected for me to summarize/ruin for you. I can assure you that no matter how many hours you’re stuck on board, no matter whether the guy in the middle seat sticks his elbow into your ribs, and no matter how vile the smell wafting from the bathroom, you’ll lose yourself in Jeunet’s screen magic. Even better if you’re a French speaker, as the English subtitles miss some of the puns and the silliest humor that relies on the nuances of the original French.

Most of all, I love Jeunet for his unabashed love of film and his playful takes on old, old storylines. In Micmacs, there’s a great scene in which our heroes break into someone’s house — but the owner shows up! What will they do?!? In Delicatessen, Jeunet includes the loveliest scene of a date between a former clown (Pinon, a Jeunet regular) and the painfully shy Julie (Marie-Laure Daugnac), who decides to remove her glasses to be more attractive, even though this means she won’t be able to see anything. The very age-old familiarity of that scene only enhances its sweetness. All of this makes me believe that Jeunet loves film on a cellular level, and that in recycling bits of film story history he has found a means of cultivating the same love in his viewers. See Micmacs and let yourself enjoy that childlike pleasure too.

“Tiny Furniture” (2010), fresh air

“Oh, you look so pretty!” coos one of Aura’s old friends as she walks into a party — a line that drips with fake flattery. Aura (Lena Dunham) responds, “Oh, are you serious? I feel like this outfit just screams, like, ‘I’ve been living in Ohio for four years — take me back to your gross apartment and have sex with me.'” She has returned home to New York after graduating from college; in Tiny Furniture, writer-director Dunham tells the tale of being a 23-year-old adrift by highlighting her sense of disjunction with this world, a New York that seems as cold and hermetic as the miniature furniture Aura’s mother photographs in tiny scenarios. Tiny Furniture is a comedy, but it’s also a mood film akin to Sofia Coppola’s work — a film about what it means to be young, gifted, and dreaming of connection.

Maybe her Ohio college encouraged Aura’s earnestness and wry self-deprecation, but it’s clear they’ve always been part of her personality — and both tendencies are out of place in New York. Part of her sense of alienation is physical: her pudgy body contrasts with her mother’s and sister’s tall, willowy elegance (and Dunham loves to exaggerate with slumped shoulders and unflattering scenes of wandering the apartment in a t-shirt and underwear). Making it worse is the fact that her family doesn’t quite welcome her back with open arms; in Aura’s absence the two seem to have formed a tight bond that now feels exclusive, even chilly. Aura’s true sense of difference, however, comes from her desire to be an artist like her successful photographer mother and prizewinning poet sister — yet with only 357 hits on her YouTube video and a liberal-arts college degree in film theory, where does she start to find a path to artistic success? Her New York friends are tragically hip, glamorous, and decidedly unambitious; in fact, they seem to view ambition as the road to public humiliation, so they sit back and observe the world instead. Like so many recent college grads who move back home, Aura skirts the issue of her own dreams by getting a stupid job at a restaurant, going to parties with old friends, and drifting.

Then there are the boys. Aura’s longtime college boyfriend just dumped her — “something about having to build a shrine to his ancestors out of a dying tree” back home in Colorado, she explains with self-deprecating skepticism — and the New York options get worse the more we get to know them. She develops a crush on the restaurant’s hot chef (above), who only notices her intermittently and seems to see her primarily as a source of prescription painkillers. Then there’s Jed (below), an artist with a minor YouTube following for his Nietzschean Cowboy video despite its dubious contribution to the world of performance art. Jed coyly indicates he’s visiting New York for meetings with agents and producers, yet he has no money, no place to stay, and no clear interest in Aura. When she hears of him, Aura burbles, “He’s a little bit famous,” to which her more cool, cosmopolitan New York friend responds dismissively, “Yeah, I guess, in, like, an internet kind of way.” Plowing ahead with her aimless hopefulness, Aura invites Jed to stay in the apartment when her mother and sister depart on a college tour.

Critics have rightfully sung the praises of Dunham’s funny script — which only very occasionally suffers from a bit too much of a 23-year-old’s eagerness to include all her funny observations of stilted interactions — but for me it was the cinematography that marks the film’s best achievement. The filming does such a great service in marking the story’s contrasts. We faintly perceive that Aura’s mother’s apartment is one of those rare, extraordinarily huge and sunny New York spaces only possessed by the very wealthy and those who purchased real estate in the very distant past — yet the film portrays it as sterile, windowless, a sea of white paint and forbidding minimalism. The rare exterior shots are almost jarring when we realize there might be an outdoor urban world to be enjoyed; Aura’s one chance for sex takes place in a grimly awful enclosed space in an abandoned lot. Between those shots and the closed-off emotions of the New Yorkers around her, Aura appears even more a breath of fresh air utterly out of place. And that freshness goes for much more than her terrific sense of humor. The last time I saw a female protagonist onscreen with an imperfect body was in Precious (2009), a film that sought to make a very different point. Dunham plays this role with a determination to show how much her character feels physically and emotionally stymied by New Yorkers’ svelte, arch coolness. This is the film Greenberg could have been if it hadn’t been so determined to humiliate women.

Tiny Furniture is the kind of film I’m looking for as a feminist — written and directed by a woman, featuring a story about a woman that doesn’t limit her to romance or a rape scenario, and going in unexpected narrative directions. 2010 seems to have been a good year for women in film, but as Melissa Silverstein’s facts about the numbers of women in film show, there’s still a long way to go. Good thing that Lena Dunham is now only 24 and has a lot more films left in her.

Attitude readjustment

It seems to me after my last dispiriting post on bad teachers onscreen that I’m approaching the new semester with the wrong perspective. And though I have no intention of going the way of Miss Jean Brodie following her prime, I can aspire to look like Miss Maggie Smith during her prime — that elegant scarf, the strawberry coif, the bedroom eyes, the sense of certainty. And we’re off for another day in the classroom!

School Daze

The semester begins and my mind is filled with all those awful school scenes from movies. The string of teachers at the school in Fellini’s Amarcord (couldn’t find a copy with subtitles, but you get the picture):

Mr. Hand from Fast Times at Ridgemont High:

Ben Stein as the most boring history teacher ever from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:

Now that I’ve invoked the worst in a curse-breaking kind of ceremony, here we go with a new semester. Students arrive, professors are confused, we struggle to introduce our classes, ramp up the enthusiasm and conversation, and nip behavioral/attention problems in the bud. Anyone? Anyone?