the groundhog day project

It was Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini that reminded me of the movie Somewhere in Time a while back in relation to Groundhog Day . But, even more appropriately, there is a sort of time loop at the heart of Somewhere in Time , based on the novel Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson, as well. I am watching it right now. The premise is simple enough. A playwright--Christopher Reeve as Richard Collier--wills himself back in time through hypnosis to meet an actress--Jane Seymour as Elise McKenna--who, as an old woman, approached him out of nowhere, gave him a pocket watch and told him, "Come back to me." Okay, maybe it's not that simple. But, anyway, they fall in love, yada yada yada, tragic ending. Rachmaninov's musical piece, which Phil learns in Punxsutawney and plays at the Groundhog Banquet and quite memorably jazzes up, recurs throughout Somewhere in Time . The past section in the film is set in 1912 but the music would not actually be composed until 1934. R...

This is from yesterday : [Benesh] writes about references to eating the groundhog--Phil says he "had groundhog for lunch" and he reports about how the people of Punxsutawney "used to take the hog out and they used to eat it"--and she adds one more: "In another reference to ingesting the Other, Phil Connors once proposes toasting [to] the groundhog" (Benesh, 2011, p. 88). I don't know how it works in Benesh's circles, but whenever I have been present for a toast, we have not then eaten the person (or thing) being toasted. Still, there's a pink tab here labeled "eating groundhog." She continues: Phil Connors' desire to ingest the groundhog seems a parallel to his early hostile come-ons toward Rita, the allusion to his pelvic tilt, and to her sleeping alone and missing him, followed by his attempts to seduce her. (p. 88) Because, clearly, Phil wants to eat Rita... and I'm using "eat" in the literal sense. This is ...

In the fall, I wrote three big papers. Two of them linked to Groundhog Day --my Christ-Figure paper and my confirmation bias paper--but the third--my rhetoric paper--did not. It was very sad. This quarter, I'm actually rewriting (and doubling in length) that rhetoric paper, and while I haven't figured out quite how to justify including a reference to Groundhog Day because there aren't really a bunch of movie examples, I did discover a quotation in one of my sources that fits into a discussion of Groundhog Day . It's a little backward, but it almost makes up for my inability to include it. (A sad sidenote: out of my three papers in this winter quarter, nary a one makes mention of Groundhog Day . I have clearly not been trying hard enough.) Anyway, the line, from Schiltz (2006): As we have seen, on the one hand, the account provided in Plato's Phaedrus makes the further move toward one in which the sensual desires are instrumentally valuable as motivation for ...

In my recent paper "From Charioteer Myth to Shoulder Angel: A Look at our Divided Soul" (2013) I detailed the connection between Plato's charioteer myth from Phaedrus and the modern phenomenon of the shoulder angel and shoulder devil--you know the thing: While I mentioned the early 90s television series Herman's Head , the ensemble cast of which included Ken Hudson Campbell, a.k.a. Man in Hallway, a.k.a. Chubby Man, in the paper, it was the one of my three papers I wrote in the fall that didn't include Groundhog Day . Today, while reading the rest of Benesh's (2011) dissertation, one of the notions I scribbled down--this one not related to anything in Benesh's piece--was about Phil's shoulder devil and shoulder angel... or rather his lack of the same. This is what I wrote down--along the right edge of my copy of the tournament schedule if you must know: Phil has no shoulder devil, only a shoulder angel. Why? Because the film is about dealing with...

Continuing from yesterday , like I have done twice before , it's impromptu quotation tie-in night. I meant to do all 21 quotations from round 2 of impromptu from yesterday's tournament, but I was apparently quite tired. I actually don't usually get so exhausted from a tournament as a coach as I used to get as a competitor, but it was a long three days. I've got a few weekends off now before another 3-day tournament. In the meantime, The Groundhog Day Project continues. "What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers." - Logan Pearsall Smith. To tie this to Groundhog Day the first step is to broaden it a bit so it isn't all about authors--our quiet actions are more genuine than our louder actions, I might say. Our best actions are not the ones about which we take the time to boast. Pre-loop Phil Connors is the kind of guy who would boast about most anything he could. Rita calls him incredible--and just did this as the movie play...

This isn't really part two to yesterday's bit about therapy. But, it does follow in its way, and I just had to use the rest of the psychiatrist's line as a title. Having dealt with Daughton and Bacha again yesterday, I wanted to get back to gender. In particular, I'd reference the following from Daughton: Connors must embark on what is traditionally a feminine rather than a masculine quest, journeying inward in order to encounter and submit to the power of the dark goddess, rather than outward in order to master and claim some object in the external world. I don't know about the dark goddess bit--I'll get to more on that in a moment--but I appreciate that, in this instance at least, Daughton calls it "traditionally feminine " instead of simply "feminine." I've said before, dividing the quest into two based on gender seems, in the present, inappropriate. But, looking backward, it makes sense to look at stories in terms of gender-divid...