Iberian and Latin American Films

I often have students ask me about Spanish language films that I recommend for them. This often comes after they try to identify a film on Netflix that looks like it isn’t soft porn.

The following is my ongoing list of films made by Latin American or Iberian directors, along with their canistream.it post. Most of these are in Spanish or Portuguese, although some are also in English. I am sure that there are some omissions, and I would love to hear your comments below about what you might recommend. But I think this is a good start. If you have specific questions about any of these films, don’t hesitate to contact me.

María Candelaria (1944) (Drama)

Río escondido (1948) (Drama)

El bolero de Raquel (1957) (Comedy)

El padrecito (1964) (Comedy)

El abuelo (1998)

The Others (2001) (Suspense/Thriller)

Valentín (2002) (Drama)

Mar adentro (2004) (Drama)

Machuca (2004) (Drama)

Antônia: O Filme (2006) (Musical/Drama)

El laberinto del fauno (2006) (Drama)

Sleep Dealer (2008) (Mexico) (Sci-Fi)

Agora (2009) (Drama)

The Impossible (2012) (Drama)

Sending a Direct Message through Twitter for iPhone

This is a continuation of my last post. Here are the directions for sending a DM (private tweet) through Twitter for iPhone.

How to send a DM from Twitter for iPhone

From your home screen, tap on the "Me" icon in the bottom right corner.

From your home screen, tap on the "Me" icon in the bottom right corner.

Tap on the Direct Message icon (it looks like a mail icon)

Tap on the Direct Message icon (it looks like a mail icon)

Tap on the compose icon in the top right corner.

Tap on the compose icon in the top right corner.

Begin typing the name of the person you want to DM (this will automatically populate)

Begin typing the name of the person you want to DM (this will automatically populate)

Type your message (140 characters or less) and tap "Send"

Type your message (140 characters or less) and tap "Send"

Sending a Direct Message through Twitter.com

A lot of my students ask me about how to send a direct message through Twitter. This is how you do it.

How to send a Direct Message (DM) in Twitter

Access you direct messages on Twitter

Click on the gear icon in the top right corner and then click on Direct Messages.

Access you direct messages on Twitter

Click on new message

Click on new message

Type in the handle of the person to whom you want to send the direct message.

Twitter will autopopulate a list of people who follow you (these are the people you can send direct messages to).

Type in the handle of the person to whom you want to send the direct message.

Click "Send Message"

Click "Send Message"

Springpad vs Pinterest in the Classroom

Over the past year or so I've been using Pinterest to plan my classes and to gather and share things that I find interesting for my classes and for my research -- as well as to collaborate with students in class prep. At the beginning of this semester, however, I came across Springpad. I see it as a kind of bridge between Evernote (which is less visual than Springpad) and Pinterest (which is less functional). 

I like Springpad because I can add bookmarks, books, films, etc, and it recognizes what I am adding. Like Evernote or Pinterest I can add collaborators, but Springpad caps me at 25 collaborators per notebook. That's a problem because I regularly want to share a notebook for all of my students. All of this is making me consider going back to Pinterest for this. I suppose that's what I will probably do in the short run. I want my students to be able to collaborate. 

Too bad. Springpad really had me going for a bit. I'll probably revisit it in the future.

Here is a link to a great blog post about using Springpad in the classroom.

 

 

One Week on the Job

I haven't written for a while because I have been trying to make my way through the general craziness associated with getting a new job. About a month ago I was hired on as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Philosophy at Southern Utah University. I am very happy to be here, and I look forward to being able to do some great creative projects. One of the things that drew me to SUU was their commitment to engaged learning. This video (which was done by my new colleague Todd Petersen) gives a pretty good idea of what we are all about here.

Roger Scruton: Scientism and the Humanities

Two weeks ago, I went to hear a talk at the library by Roger Scruton called "Scientism and the Humanities." It was one of the most provocative talks I have heard in quite some time. Scruton defined Scientism as "pretending to apply the scientific method to non-scientific questions." This struck me because I have been thinking a lot lately about autism and the humanities and what light artistic representations of autism might shed on not just that condition, but the human condition.

Specifically I've been thinking about Manuel Rivas's beautiful short story "La triste historia de Eva" in which he tells the devastating true story of a little girl named Eva who was lost in the mountains of Galicia and died of exposure. I've read the story several times and I want to write about it, but I keep coming up against a stone wall. For some reason, however, Scruton's talk got me thinking. For example, he described Interpretation as "the art of finding the subject in the object." The thought is simple, but has everything to do with Rivas's story, which engages that very issue. One of the biggest challenges for people with autism is theory of the mind, or "the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions that are different from one's own ." I watched Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close this week, and was struck by something Oskar Schell states in a monologue in that film. He says: "People aren't like numbers. They're more like letters... and those letters want to become stories... and dad said that stories need to be shared". This YouTube video really highlights the tension between Oskar's desire to see the people as numbers and the way that the world constantly pushes back at him with story.

Rivas plays with the same ideas in his story, only he talks about mirrors. The person with autism only sees the exterior of the people around them -- as if they were merely reflections in a mirror. The interior remains a black box. But isn't this exactly the case of the neurotypical person when they look at a person with autism as well? Isn't it the case, as Levinas points out, with the human condition in general? I might assume that I know how someone feels by the look on their face, but I must also always remember that the people around me are infinite beings, full of mystery and ultimately unknowable.

The beauty of artistic representations of autism -- like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close or La triste historia de Eva is that they give us a glimpse beyond the exterior, they push us beyond explanation and analysis and into the realm of understanding.

Fernando J. López del Oso

This week the Spanish author Fernando J. López del Oso is visiting BYU. I met Fernando last weekend on the way home from the airport. He is smart and articulate and while I haven't read his work yet, I'm looking forward to it.

Fernando gave a talk yesterday called "Los ojos del hombre" in which he discussed the relationship between science in literature in general and in his own work. He is clearly well-read and has thought things through. He will be speaking again tomorrow at 9am in B092 in the JFSB about his novel Yeti (2011). I look forward to it.

Carolina Conference on Romance Literatures

Last week I had the great opportunity to participate in the Carolina Conference on Romance Literatures held on the campus of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. I traveled with my colleague here at BYU, Dale Pratt, and we had a great time. The panels that I attended were all quite interesting. I was especially pleased to hear a talk by Antonia Delgado-Poust on Dulce Chacón's La voz dormida (2006). Antonia did a great job exploring feminine antagonism in the work. I also really enjoyed David Gies's talk entitled "Such is Glorious War" in which he outlined how the eye-witness testimony of Robert Blakeny, a soldier from Ireland who served with British forces in the Peninsular War. I had heard many great things about Gies from some of my colleagues here at BYU, and he lived up to all of the hype. I was also happy to meet Samuel Amago at the conference. His Unearthing Franco's Legacy (2010) played a key role in my dissertation research.

The highlight of the conference was presenting for and meeting Rosa Montero. Dale, Juan Carlos Martín and I presented a panel about her 2010 novel Lágrimas en la lluvia. The panel was a huge success. She was gracious and smart in her response to our presentations.

Later that same day Montero gave a talk in which she discussed the importance of narrative in everyday life. Again I found her comments to be both intelligent and wise.

Here are my notes from the David Gies, David Fernández Díaz, Francisco Javier Fernández Castellano panel and from Rosa Montero's talk.

Teaching Notes: I Wish Every Class Were Like This

For class today I had my students break into small groups, go outside and read a passage of text by Nadia Seremetakis from The Senses Still, and then write a 300 word blog post about how Seremetakis's ideas about nostalgia, maturity, memory, and physicality connect with Rudolpho Anaya's Bless Me, Última.

Here is the Seremetakis passage I had them read:

The memory of Aphrodite's peach is nostalgic. What is the relation of nostalgia to the senses and history? In English the word nostalgia (in Greek nostalghia) implies trivializing romantic sentimentality. In Greek the verb nostalghó is a composite of nosto and algho. Nosto means I return, I travel (back to homeland); the noun nostos means the return, the journey, while a-nostos means without taste, as the new peaches are described (anosta, in plural). The opposite of anostos is nostimos and characterizes someone or something that has journeyed and arrived, has matured, ripened and is thus tasty (and useful). Algho means I feel pain, I ache for, and the noun alghos characterizes one's pain in soul and body, burning pain (kaimos). Thus nostalghia is the desire or longing with burning pain to journey. It also evokes the sensory dimension of memory in exile and estrangement; it mixes bodily and emotional pain and ties painful experiences of spiritual and somatic exile to the notion of maturation and ripening. In this sense, nostalghia is linked to the personal consequences of historicizing sensory experience which is conceived as a painful bodily and emotional journey.

Nostalghia thus is far from trivializing romantic sentimentality. This reduction of the term confines the past and removes it from any transactional and material relation to the present; the past becomes an isolatable and consumable unit of time. Nostalgia, in the American sense, freezes the past in such a manner as to preclude it from any capacity for social transformation in the present, preventing the present from establishing a dynamic perceptual relationship to its history. Whereas the Greek etymology evokes the transformative impact of the past as unreconciled historical experience. Does the difference between nostalgia and nostalghia speak of different cultural experiences of the senses and memory? Could a dialogical encounter of the terms offer insights for an anthropology of the senses?

It was a perfect day for this activity. Spring has decided to come around again, and students could be outside, feeling the sun on their bodies (and in their eyes) while they talked about the importance of feeling to memory and knowledge.

Research Notes: Lágrimas en la lluvia and Time and the Other

My hottest front-burner project is a talk that I will be giving in a couple of weeks at the Carolina Conference on Romance Literatures. I will be speaking on art in Rosa Montero's novel Lágrimas en la lluiva - specifically role Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid plays in highlighting some of the work's theoretical points.

The more I think about the novel, the more I have come to believe that the two central (and related) issues at stake in this work are mortality and solitude, or -- as Emmanuel Levinas would put it -- Time and the Other.

I have long admired Levinas for his ability to cut through issues of ontology in order to highlight more important issues of ethics. I often teach about Levinas because I find that students can quite easily understand the basics of his thoughts on encountering the other. But Levinas should never be underestimated. His thoughts are as powerful as they are deep. In Time and the Other he claims that Time and the Other are related because "solitude is the absence of time" (57), and Time is "the very relationship of the subject with the Other" (39). The other in this case is the unknowable, absolute mystery, and may come in the form of another consciousness, or death, or the future. In any case as a subject I am trapped in my own consciousness, my own mortality, my own present. I only experience Time as I encounter it patiently, as Levinas explains, with a lover's caress.

In Lágrimas en la lluvia Bruna (the novel's replicant protagonist) is obsessed with her own mortality, and that obsession expresses itself in the form of an incessant clock that counts down toward her (in her mind) inevitable death. She hangs Vermeer's painting on her wall, because when she admires the serenity of the servant girl. The girl's patient (bored?) gaze out the window indicates to Bruna a kind of suspension in time, like the hands on the clock have stopped turning. When Bruna looks at the painting she feels almost human because with the clock stopped, humans seem immortal to her. We could say that the frozen clock in Bruna's story would indicate for Levinas the beginning of Time.

Tech Notes: A Nice Little Workflow (nvAlt, Byword, Gmail for iOS, and Pastebot)

My eight-month-old son woke up the other morning really struggling to breathe. I took him to the emergency room and it turned out he had RSV. I was forced to spend the day in the hospital.

To add insult to injury, however, my other son was going to have his birthday party that very day. Change of plans. I had previously sent an email invite to all of the parents in his first-grade class and the RSVPs had been trickling in over the previous few days. My wife was still at home with our other three munchkins, so it was up to me to let all of these parents know that he party had been cancelled ... using only my iPhone.

I had already made a text file containing the names of everyone who had RSVPd for the party in Brett Terpstra's incredible nvALT on my iMac at work. This app syncs text files through Dropbox with Byword (a great text editor) on my iPhone so I was easily able to access the file with just a couple of taps.

Working from that master list I was able to easily search for those emails in Google's Gmail iOS app. I use this app instead of the native Mail iOS app because of the clean interface, the way it handles multiple gmail accounts, and the Google search functionality.

Some parents had left cell numbers in their RSVP emails, and I wanted to be able to text them as quickly as possible and email the rest. I drafted a quick email and copied it into Pastebot - a great little app that remembers what I have copied onto my clipboard allows me to switch between different snippets of copied text. The workflow became this:

  1. Search for email in the Gmail app.
  2. If there is no cell #, reply to the email with pasted email from Pastebot.
  3. If there is a cell #, copy it, open Messages and paste the number into the recipient field. Then open Pastebot and switch to my previously copied email message, switch back to Messages and paste the message into the text field.

Using this method I was able to fly through my list in Byword, adding an asterisk next to the names of the kids as I notified their parents of the change of plans.

I know that this is maybe not a big deal for a lot of people, but these simple apps working together made it possible for me to quickly and with little friction get the task done, with time left over to write up this little post - also in Byword.

​nvALT on Mac

​Byword for iPhone

​Gmail for iOS

​Pastebot for iPhone

Here goes ...

Dear Reader,

Over the past year or so I have integrated blogging into the structure of the literature and humanities courses I teach at BYU. I have found during that time that as sudents post weekly to a blog, they think more deeply and write more clearly.

I figure now is as good a time as any to take some of my own medicine and start a blog of my own.

So what can you expect if you continue reading this blog? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. I imagine that over time it will evolve, but for now I plan on using this as a space in which I can explore publicly some things that until now I have mostly been trying to work out in my head. I would love to receive comments on the things that I write (either here or through Twitter), but my first audience is myself (as I think should always be the case in this type of endeavor).

I can say that in this blog I will write about the things that are on my mind — both theoretical and practical — as they relate to teaching, writing, language, and the humanities. I will write about what I do and how I do it. I will write about some of the texts and theories we are discussing in my classes. I will also pass along tips and tricks about things that are removing friction from my life and allowing me focus more attention on producing more creative, higher-quality work. If you are interested in learning more about the way or the things that I teach and research, then I invite you along for the ride. If you have any questions or comments or suggestions about things you would like me to write about, please let me know in the comment section below or contact me through email (toddkmack@byu.edu) or on Twitter (@toddkmack).