finals week

I have perhaps two hundred papers left to read and grade by Friday. Despite that, I just spent three hours on one paper. One. It was so interesting that I had to write back to the author in the margins of her excellent essay, and things kept growing, and then I started to think about why I thought the things that I wrote to the author, and then started writing a response to her, and that grew into a couple of typed pages, and finally I woke up and thought “WHAT AM I DOING?!” And with the couple of pages my three hours had grown to four and I still have read only one paper so far today.

Do I, perhaps, have a time management problem?

My world

Papers.

Hell week

Oh, that title might be a little overdone, but I’ve just finished my last class of the semester, and so now the paper avalanche is in full fall. The next week or ten days will be long days at my desk without the pleasure of interrupting in order to go to class.

The reading will mostly be pleasurable, but it will be enormous and intense. That is what it is to be a writing teacher.

“Movie” magic

A couple of days ago I was in a film shoot. The community choir that I’m in was asked by a producer/director to participate in a music video–of werewolves.

I know almost nothing of modern music, so I don’t know whether Lo-Fi Sugar is important or nobody, but my choir ended up standing on a snow covered hill in fifteen below zero temperatures for a couple of hours making fools of ourselves as background while a pretty young woman with an wool-backed oversized guitar wandered around pretending to be singing and a man with some amusingly ghastly make-up and a guitar with a bayonet on its end also wandered around and werewolves were being shot by another man with even more dreadful makeup who was sporting a shotgun.

It was very funny.

It was also funny just getting there. The scene was shot under a bridge. To get there, the choir had to wade down a hill through deep snow and over a high snow bank. These middle to late middle–and maybe quite a bit past late middle–aged people were slipping, falling on their backs, falling on their faces, and laughing so hard you’d think they were all five year olds.

The director of the shoot thought we were a blast.

This is what we do for our art.

Radio rumination

On this past Sunday the community choir that I am part of gave two performances of Bach’s “Magnificat,” along with a few lighter pieces. I was the bass soloist for the Bach. It was a challenging solo, for which I prepared intensely.

This morning, and again yesterday, two people I know have reported that they had heard announcers on two different radio stations talking about Mark Christensen’s solo singing, one of them recommending that anyone who meets me should ask me to demonstrate.

I don’t listen to local radio. When I have the radio on, it’s tuned to NPR–either the news and information branch or the classical music one–so I don’t hear the local talk shows at all.

It is very weird to realize that people are talking about me on the radio without my knowing it. I’m not sure what I feel about that. It’s sort of a feeling that someone else is taking over my public persona.

We all have people talk about us outside our own presence. But on the radio?

I have to think about this. I’m oddly off balance.