Month: November 2002

Nyssa: I’m not too worried about perceived indiscretions. I don’t interact much with students through work, and most of those with whom I do interact are grad students. And a number of them spend most every waking moment squirreled away in the lab. If I’m not mistaken, none of the members of the Python Society are in the department where I work, and I’m not in a position of any real authority where it might become an issue, even if they were. I don’t think you should necessarily worry. If you find a club on campus that you like, I think you should enjoy yourself. Someone could just as easily try to make Eric suffer because you refused to lend him/her a pencil in class, or because of something equally ridiculous. College should be fun for adult students, too.

As for the hug, de nada. I’m just glad it helped.

John: There was a campus improv group briefly, but it seems to have folded about as quickly as it started. I knew the president and founder — he’s actually the one who first took over for me as Python Society president when I graduated — but I never attended a meeting. His idea of a good improv game was a little different than mine and seems to have grown out of live action roleplaying more than anything else. I tried to get into LARPs, briefly, but the game I was in fell apart, and the people who’d convinced me to go in the first place moved away, so my interest sort of waned. The opportunity to play again never really arose, and, quite frankly, some of those people scare me.

We started doing comedic improv with the Python Society while I was still president, and, although some people seemed to enjoy it, I’m not sure I’d characterize it as a smashing success. When we started to rehearse for our first live show a couple of years later, we decided to break the evening up with games like “Questions Only” and “World’s Worst” and “Helping Hands“. That way, if nothing else, there were fewer lines to memorize. And it was great fun within the group, but in front of an audience it was a little more difficult. We froze up or relied on the worst suggestions from the crowd, and we’ve been a little hesitant about trying it again. We did co-sponsor a night of improv on campus last fall, but the late time and the location didn’t work to our advantage. We ended up doing a lot of the improvising ourselves, rather than getting audience members involved, and the results weren’t always spectacular.

But I still miss it. I miss the improv we did at meetings more than anything else. I miss thinking on my feet, the challenge of making something like “Two-Line Vocabulary” funny, and the energy that comes from thinking you’re going to fall flat on your face and instead making somebody laugh. The problem with getting a new group together is a) I’m much more comfortable with people I already know, and b) I don’t know anybody else. Right now, all my local friends are within the club, and I’m not entirely sure where to go looking outside of it.

Which is, of course, part of the problem. I wouldn’t be so worried about becoming irrelevant if I had other areas on which to focus my attention.

Sharon: Thank you. Although you did make me suffer somewhat for those crinkly-paper newsletters that first meeting, I have always been glad you decided to attend. I sometimes find it difficult to remember that there was a time when I didn’t know you. You’re still relevant to me, too. I don’t, for instance, read your weblog just because you read mine. I read it because I think you’re an interesting person, and I want to know what you have to say.

And I agree with you, to some extent, about Penn State. I like this town, but I sometimes worry that what I like most about it is its familiarity. A few undergraduate students have called me sir, and I think one visiting scholar actually called me Professor a month ago, but it isn’t the perceived aged difference that really bothers me. Like you said, it’s trying to hold onto something and instead being reminded that you’re no longer a part of it really. That feeling has become a little more pronounced this year. Maybe it’s because I don’t yet know any of these new members, or because I’m throwing too much of my energy into one area, but I don’t know.

I have to wonder: if the club isn’t keeping me here, what is?

And I thought, “What if there was something from a previous culture that was innately powerful, and then people picked it up to make a buck from it and ended up disseminating some really dangerous piece of information?” Like nuclear waste. What’s to say that, in God knows how many years, some culture isn’t going to pick up our nuclear waste and start making jewelry out of it? There’s this big government project in Nevada, for artists to create a sculpture that will be frightening enough to keep people away from the nuclear-waste dump for the next 10,000 years. Supposedly, there’s never been a form of semantics, a language, that has existed that long. They’re trying to find something that will function as language beyond our civilization, that will keep people away from there forever and ever. I just think that’s a glorious idea.

From a review of the new Harry Potter movie:

Like its predecessor, Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets works perfectly well as a cinematic corollary to J.K. Rowling’s adored children’s fantasy series….But try imagining a universe in which the Harry Potter series existed only in film form. Would audiences still find themselves transported by such thinly drawn characters? Would the imaginations still leap for the nonstop assault of impressively realized but creatively pedestrian special effects? And would the two-and-a-half-hours-plus trek toward an unmasking straight out of Scooby Doo seem quite so satisfying?”