Taking solace in, well, something.

In Sideways, it's clear what Miles does to get through the day-to-day slog. His appreciation of fine wine provides a pleasure that allows him a momentary distance from whatever crap each day shovels at him. The most telling example of this comes late in the film when he drinks his '61 Cheval Blanc. He has just acted as best man at Jack's wedding, where he saw his ex-wife and her new husband. There are a lot of people around after the ceremony, but viewers get the idea that Miles doesn't know most of them and isn't quite in the mood to socialize given what he's been through over the past week. So he goes to this diner, where we see him eating a burger with onion rings and drinking from a styrofoam cup, the formal nature of his tux contrasting the crummy booth's cheap upholstery. He has the bottle of '61 Cheval Blanc on the seat of the booth next to him, and he pours its contents into his styrofoam cup serving by serving when no one's looking. The uncrowded diner with only a few people ordering at the counter and a man and a woman each eating alone on the other side of the room creates the perfect aesthetic environment for the emotional goals of the scene. As Miles drinks from the wine after a bite of his burger, we see in his face and hear in his slight moan that the '61 Cheval Blanc lives up to the weighty expectations surrounding it. This moment gives us the delicate balance between the sadness of being alone while experiencing such an extraordinary pleasure and the exquisite, comforting nature of the same pleasure.

Of course, I'm sure we can all relate to such a thing. In my case, for instance, it's not uncommon for me to stop after a particularly thoughtless, sloppy, and unintelligent student essay I've graded at my dining room table. I'll get up at such a moment, sometimes near tears at the hopeless states of education and intelligence in this country. I'll walk over to my bookshelf and pick up my thick volume of Robert Creeley's early poems. The weight of the book is comforting in and of itself, suggesting as it does the quantity of wonderfully crafted poetry inside. Creeley's hyper-intelligence as a poet, his ability to create hope from ambiguity, and the elegant grace with which he deals with the concepts central to his poems never fail to make me feel something similar to what I imagine Miles to be feeling as he drinks his '61 Cheval Blanc.

I wonder if there's something more to the solitary nature of the two aforementioned pleasures. Is there a sad comfort in being among the small population of those who can appreciate the most exquisitely constructed poetry or the most delicately subtle wines? The sadness of solitude, such as it is, might be countered by the pleasures afforded through these sorts of things. Or maybe not. Maybe these things are just pretentious and sad unless we can find others with whom to share them. Who can say?

Making peace with the ignorance of the masses, or something equally pretentious yet desireable.

These last few weeks, I've graded mindless student essay after mindless student essay. I wonder how many more self-righteous, ignorant, lazy 18-year-olds who drive around SUVs that daddy bought them will tell me that some of the best literature ever produced in the English language is "dumb," "stupid," or, my favorite, "gay," before I lose it completely. Fortunately, as I'm sure many of you know (if, in fact, some of the people I know really read this), I don't plan to stay in my bust-your-ass-for-nothing line of work much longer. But while I'm still here doing adjunct faculty slave-wage work for three different colleges and universities, I can really get into Sideways. That film portrays sympathetically, and perhaps even glamorizes, the pathetic and sad yet beautiful and necessary existence of those who teach English.

Of course, the fact that Miles is an English teacher might escape many who watch the film. It's not a central part of the plot or even of Miles's character. But there's a gorgeous scene very near the end of the film in which we see Miles in the classroom. In it, the boys in the obviously private school all wear khaki pants and sit quietly with blank looks on their faces as one of them reads from the moving, sad scene of Phineas' funeral in John Knowles' novel A Seperate Peace. In the golden light, the camera moves in to focus on Miles as he savors Knowles' words and their clear implications concerning his own life. When the student finishes that infamous passage about how you do not cry at your own funeral and asks if he should continue, Miles says "No. No; we'll pick up there Monday." When he asks Miles if he should continue, the student refers to him as Mr. England or something like that (it's difficult to discern). With that disorienting Mr. something, Miles' alienation in that environment is rendered complete and understandable. Those kids have no idea who he is and most likely don't care.

In my own case, it seems to me that most of my students don't really think of me as a real person, and they often seem shocked when I relate to them some anecdote from my own life that happens to be relevant to what we're reading. Presumably, the shocking part to them is that I am human, a real person with real experiences sometimes similar to theirs, not some kind of anomaly who exists only in their English classroom for three hours each week. At any rate, as much as I am able to relate with and be liked by my students more so than many of my colleagues, those students, by virtue of their treatment of the classroom environment and the ways in which they speak to me (or don't), sometimes seem less than the real people I know they are, the real people who would make teaching an extraordinary thing. Thus, they create an appropriately alienating environment. The way in which the camera moves in on Miles as one of his students reads from A Seperate Peace mirrors for me exactly what I go through every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I can see it now--one of my students reads aloud from a Scott Silsbe poem and looks up blankly. No, I think, not wanting to ruin the beauty of the poem with the inevitable classroom bullshit, we'll pick up there on Monday. And so will we.

Winter in Pittsburgh is for pansies.

I must admit my excitement when I saw that my parents had purchased the March of the Penguins DVD. Antarctica has always fascinated me; places with vast open spaces and few human inhabitants are rare indeed these days. Rarer still are glimpses into what goes on in such places. Plus, I figured that a documentary about such a mundane group of animals that did so well in the box office had to be good. I mean, from what I've seen, penguins spend most of their time standing around making noises at one another with occasional trips into frigid seawater to feed. Surely a film about things as dull as that had to be great to get so many people out to see it. But clearly I should have known better. After all, this is a country just over half full of people so stupid and clueless that they elected the village idiot as their President. Then again, documentary films like Buena Vista Social Club and Bowling for Columbine did well at the box office too, and dammit, I wanted to see a film that takes place entirely in Antarctica, so I borrowed the DVD from my parents and watched the thing.

As you might be able to tell from that less than enthusiastic opening, I didn't much like March of the Penguins. In fact, I nearly turned it off about 20 minutes in when the mating scene began. Morgan Freeman has a good voice, but even he can't save a script with more meaningless, cliched phrases than this week's State of the Union Address and such clunky language that my 18-year-old composition students could have written something better. And the music! My God; I didn't think it was possible to compliment such awful voice-over with worse music, but these uber-talented filmmakers did just that. During the mating scene, while Morgan Freeman went on and on about these birds' love for each other and the screen displayed seemingly endless beak-to-beak action and penguin neck rubbing, the speakers blared the most awful, tinkly-piano laced, lovey-dovey string music ever conceived by man. But I did make it through the mating scene, and gradually I learned to tune out the ridiculously bad voice-over that kept attributing human emotions and thought processes to birds and implying all kinds of crap about the penguins' caring, spectacular, monogamous mating relationships while also informing the viewers that each penguin chooses a new mate every year.

But those filmmakers did get some spectacular footage. The shots of Antarctica look amazing, desolate, beautiful. The shots of the penguins' claws catch viewers unaware, and all the footage of penguins transferring their eggs back and forth and waddling around balancing the eggs on their claws looks unbelievable. The process through which these penguin eggs reach maturity and hatch (or don't) could be fascinating subject matter. And the underwater scenes with penguins darting this way and that so quickly seem so surreal that people might wonder whether or not they're computer generated. What a shame that such amazingly good footage has to go to waste. But maybe not. Maybe after they've had a few good beers, people could watch the film on mute and fast-forward through the mating montage.