Back From Sabbatical
-or-
Dear Me, Has It Been a Month?

A thousand pardons for the lack of posts over the past month. It's been quite a rollercoaster. As I'm sure many of you already know, I have recently started a new job back at the dear old Alma Mater, NYU, and am pleased to report that, aside from the addition of several new buildings, a handful of administrative restructurings, and one or two departmental re-namings, life at NYU remains the merry old humdrum of casual sporting, swilling Sherry and smoking cheroots with the Dons, singing madrigals, and lazilly punting on the East River that I remember so fondly. I am even informed that out men's basetball team finished a respectable 23rd in NCAA Division 16 this year; a figure sure to make the underclassmen at bold little upstarts like GMU quake and rattle in their Reeboks. Grim Grey Pallisades, indeed, George Mason. Beware the Violet storm...

At any rate, the whole experience has been rather consuming, as any new appointment is wont to be, and I've neglected this humble little patch of cyberspace for some time as a result. Well, as Douglas MacArthur once growled through a cloud of pipe tobacco smoke, "I have returned." Or something to that effect.

I just finished watching Oliver Hirschbiegel's "Downfall" (or "Der Untergang," to you German speakers out there). For anyone who doesn't use the "Best Foreign Film" segment of the Academy Awards as a chance to fire up a bag of microwave Kettle Corn, it was a nominee this past year along with "Tsotsi" and a few others. Although I wouldn't immediately recommend a film about the last weeks of WWII in Hitler's bunker as bedtime viewing (as I have just done...thanks Netflix), I can't say enough about the film itself. Really, realy excellent, and a bold departure for a German film industry that has historically shied away from Hitler portrayals for fear of any number of criticisms or reprisals.

I also found this passage today in Volume 7 of The Flasman Papers (I've touched on these before, with much praise), and it only goes to strengthen my belief that no one quite gets it like George MacDonald Fraser...

"You see, it's been the great illusion of our civilization that when the poor heathen saw our steamships and elections and drains and bottled beer, he'd realise what a benighted ass he'd been and come into the fold. But he don't. Oh, he'll take what he fancies, and can use (cheap booze and rifles, for example), but not on that account will he think we're better. He knows different." (Flashman and the Redskins, 1982)

Any writer who can get that idea across through a drunken, cowardly, womanising scoundrel of a protagonist (and for twelve volumes... and set in the mid 19th Century... and HUMOROUSLY) has got to be some kind of genius. And a timely genius, at that. I was pleased to see, last month, that Christopher Hitchens felt the same way.