Yesterday I felt a slight twinge of guilt. I was chopping up turnips and carrots for Izzy (for the lamb stew I was making later that day) and listening to Hotel Costes Quatre, Stephane Pompougnac’s happily mindless downtempo / deep house / Latin compilation. It’s the kind of music you’d hear in clubs that would never let people like me inside, or — as my brother is fond of saying — models-to-jiggle-their-boobs-to-while-coming-down-a-catwalk music. Or words to that effect.

In any case, I felt a little guilty when I realized that Christ was actually dead and buried in the ground, and there I was, listening to party music. So I cast about looking for something somber, even if inappropriate, to play — Verdi’s Requiem? A Shostakovich symphony? (I almost pulled out an old Amy Grant CD, but realized that wouldn’t work either.) It was, after all, Good Friday, when Filipinos are nailed to the cross and reporters from all over the world promptly file their stories on it. My favorite crucifixion-related story has to do with the only non-Christian, Shinichiro Kaneko, who was crucified in 1995 or 1996 supposedly to ask God to heal a terminally ill brother. It turned out he was an S&M porn star in Japan, and the videotaped proceedings were sold in sex shops all over the country. (Later on his name even shows up on a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode!)

I’m also swamped with grading, since I just received a whole slew of papers yesterday. And I would have to admit that I gave the students some rather difficult topics: one on raves and the creation of mass culture (or subcultures) and its relation to cultural capital, or one on dance music and sexuality.

What a bad time, then, for the following books to all arrive in the mail yesterday — I keep peeking at them little by little when I get bored: Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Miracle Fruit, Oliver de la Paz’s Names above Houses, Nick Carbo’s El Grupo McDonald’s, and Luisa Igloria’s In the Garden of the Three Islands.

All right, back to work.

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