who the fuck is smoking in my room?

I just popped in Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003) because my friend and I were discussing Black Book (2006), the Dutch movie we're going to see on Thursday. I suddenly got the craving to see something that takes place in Holland. I couldn't wait until Thursday, apparently.

In case you are wondering, my posts are bland these days because I want to refrain from focusing on the negative. But I will say that I had a bizarre cross-cultural experience today, receiving feedback on my essay in front of eight others from the class. He did the same to them, too, and I think he was incredibly condescending and humiliating to these girls. But I'm sure his intentions were good, or at least he hoped they would come off that way...

I will say I wasn't happy with the mark I received. It's not the end of the world. But I honestly thought he didn't understand me because his main criticism about my paper was that I concentrated too much on subjective, personal history instead of collective history. The paper was about how our individual memories/interpretations of the past are a part of our identity and how we view the past depends a lot on who we are. For the benefit of everyone else in the room, he read out my title first, "History as I Remember It: The Intersection of History, Memory & Identity." Then he started to nitpick at my choosing the first person. I had to explain that I didn't mean for "I" to reflect me, Alexandra. Rather, it's just better than the detached, impersonal "one." It is meant to stress the individual's uniqueness. In any case, I thought he was a postmodernist and would understand where I was coming from, thinking my essay was just a continuation of the discourse in class. Did I really have to re-hash everything about collective memory given the word limitations?

Tomorrow, I go to a lecture on the representation of women and femininity in contemporary Brazilian cinema. The visiting lecturer is only going to focus on two films. Wow. She's really running the gamut there, eh? Well, I suppose it's probably just a chapter for a book manuscript. Nevertheless, I'll let you know what I think.

I guess I couldn't resist the negative.