What to Think About The Sound of Music: A Dialogue
Spouse: Here comes our first whole-family movie criticism collaborative! The Sound of Music is in some ways so ubiquitous that it’s almost possible to go through life thinking you’ve seen it when you haven’t. You’ve heard the songs, you’ve gotten them stuck in your head, you’ve probably seen incredibly recent parodies of some of them, and you’ve gone “oh yeah, that song.” And it’s hard to overstate how great Julie Andrews is in this movie as Maria; she’s in almost every shot with a bowl cut and mostly bad clothes, and she’s radiant. I was genuinely shocked when you said you hadn’t seen it, but then again, I only assumed you had because I think it was in fact you who first introduced our daughter to “Do-Re-Mi,” which she has known by heart for a couple of years now! Was there ever a time when you remember being like “oh yeah, nah, I don’t need to see that”? Or did it just genuinely pass you by? Were you imagining that it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype, à la Citizen Kane?
I’ve just never been motivated to see it, though I always assumed I would. Many of my friends as a kid had it on VHS. I understood it to be considered one of the great musicals of all time - along with Singin’ in the Rain, which I also have not seen. I guess I should also say, I never really liked Rodgers and Hammerstein, and I tend to think most musical theater is a good 90 minutes too long.
No, this was not like Citizen Kane to me, for a couple of reasons. First, I had a very good idea of what I was in for. I mean, I have been to Salzburg and seen all the touristy hype shit there, and then we went to college only a few miles from the Trapp Family resort in Stowe Vermont and people talked about that. And I was in music school, and I feel like half the soundtrack of The Sound of Music I had to sight-read at one time or another. So I absorbed a lot about the film over the years.
Second, Citizen Kane is reputed to be one of the great films-qua-films, and while that is totally a genre, it’s a genre defined by canonical weight. Sound of Music is, to a certain generation, among the great movie musicals. While I’m totally down to put genre films in the canon (I mentioned Lord of the Rings previously), and there are musicals that I really like (Sweeney Todd and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut come to mind), it’s not my go-to genre and it’s a historically underrepresented in the canon. So the weight of the canon isn’t really there.
Yeah, I get that. And I never would have picked it as our next blog, quite frankly! But our daughter had been listening to the songs with her babysitter, and she begged us for about a week to let her watch it, and we agreed to split it into two parts and watch it over the holiday weekend. Two parts ended up being three, in the end, because she sort of lost her mind when the Nazis arrived and could neither sit still nor shush during the dialogue-heavy scenes that kind of needed to be heard in order to follow what was going on in the third act. In retrospect, for reasons we’ll get into, that actually seems pretty understandable to me, what with her recent discovery that Henry VIII of England was known for beheading his wives when they did stuff he didn’t like. At five years old, she is discovering that people do atrocious things sometimes and she is profoundly unsettled!
I think not just that - she’s realizing (because I am telling her) that the atrocious things could be done to her. Because she wants to be a princess and a queen, and she has Jewish heritage, and she fantasizes about marrying her female best friend. We don’t have to make this a parenting discussion (I’d prefer we don’t!) but I do think she’s old enough to know some of these things and better to be unsettled sooner rather than later.
Agreed, and I found myself thinking now and then about what I hoped this movie might impart, and what would require followup discussions with us. The depiction of the Nazis vis-à-vis the Austrians is one of this movie’s biggest problems: Captain Von Trapp (a very dashing Christopher Plummer) refuses to display the Nazi flag at his giant house, and we also see him leave said house and homeland behind in order to avoid working for the Third Reich. But a principled stand is not enough to make Captain Von Trapp the hero that the film needs him to be; he is presented as a stand-in for all of Austria, proudly clinging to its cultural roots as he does when he sings “Edelweiss” before the Nazis at the climactic music festival, leading the audience to imagine that Austria is just as persecuted as any of the other nations and ethnic groups that the Nazis systematically sequestered and/or murdered - Jews are, conspicuously, not spoken of a single time. No, think of the Austrians, cries the film, they may have cooperated with the Nazis, but some of them were sad about it! Given the prominent return to relevance of fascism in the U.S. in the last several years, and given that this was our young child’s first exposure to Nazism, I think we both felt like it was important to point out that the gorgeous blue-eyed, blonde-haired children on the screen having to trek into the mountains do not adequately represent the collateral damage of the Third Reich. And it seems like the movie really didn’t need to lean on that victimhood thing to make them likeable.
Yes. It arguably didn’t need the whole third act!
RIGHT? What if it just ended with the wedding??
I’ve been asking myself that exact question. And I think the answer is that it was complicated by the fact that the Von Trapps were real people and that was a selling point of the story. And then, you can’t just set a random love story in Austria in 1938 and not talk about the Nazis, that’s actually offensive. So you’d have to re-set it in America or whatever, and build out a few sub-plots because you don’t have enough story, but then why bother.
It does make a lot more sense when you put it that way. Going in, did you have expectations about they would handle this part of the story? I think you actually know more about the real Von Trapps than I do, actually, which came in handy when the kid was afraid they were going to get killed (spoiler alert: everyone is fine!)
You know, that was the one part of the movie where I didn’t know what to expect. I figured it wasn’t exactly Schindler’s List. And that’s ok, it doesn’t have to be. I think you’re right that this film doesn’t present an accurate picture of the “collateral damage of the Third Reich.” I keep asking myself whether it should’ve, though. What do you think? Is it ok for a film to go on for two hours, and then… “.....and then they escaped the Nazis okay byeeeeeeee” ???
I think the Nazis have become a facile shorthand for Evil because there is something so compelling about them, and the swastika and color scheme are so universally recognized, which makes them easy to represent visually. And without the Nazis in this movie there’s really no conflict, as you note. I guess the whole Baroness-Captain-Maria love triangle? But it resolves so easily (see below) and really the film just can’t wait to get to the part where they’re all a beautiful happy family. And for them to be a beautiful happy family united in the face of adversity there needs to be a non-Baroness source of conflict. Maybe the fact that they threw Nazis at the problem is a mark of how truly problem-free the von Trapps’ life was otherwise. Hence all the happy music!
According to wikipedia, they got hit hard by the Austrian banking crisis, i.e. Central Europe’s Great Depression, and that’s why they had to start performing music publicly in the mid-30s. I think it goes more to your first guess - so much easier to present good and evil by shorthand with Nazis. The Nazis make the Von Trapps look good; a financial crisis decimating their stock portfolio is not a compelling villain and doesn’t make them heroes. And then that messes with the plot - if they’re singing all the happy songs after they endure the central conflict of the film, to dig their way out of a hole.
And speaking of happy music, I doubt I’m alone in observing the following: as far as songs go, man did they blow their wad up front. Do all musicals do this?? Every single one of the good, memorable songs is sung before the intermission - sorry, “Climb Every Mountain.” My kingdom for a musical that saves a little something for the third act (Hamilton actually feels like the exception that proves the rule, with “It’s Quiet Uptown,” and also “Eye of the Hurricane” if you count that as the third act. Maybe Hamilton has more than three acts. That’s another blog post). This is probably a baseless and unfair critique, but I’m not here to make friends.
No, I think you’re right that a lot of musicals blow their wad up front, because that’s when you’re introducing characters and they can sing about what they love and what they want, and those are exciting and fun songs. And then you need an actual story, so you have conflict, and the later songs are about drama, there will be a minor-key reprise of what came earlier and so on. It’s a pretty well-known formula used by Rodgers and Hammerstein and also Disney, and I think you’re right that Hamilton bucks it. But if you’re going with that formula you do have to stick to it; the alternative is to try to wedge in something like the “Fixer-Upper” song on the back half of Frozen.
Ugh. Props to Frozen II for sticking it out to the end without reprises and bullshit troll songs.
Seriously. I think “Climb Every Mountain” is definitely forcing it. It comes in the back half and it’s a song about doing everything you can with your life, and it’s sung by an old cloistered nun, who did not climb every mountain? I feel like my response to that is wrapped up in my feelings about Catholicism. Which honestly, having spent a lot of time with Catholic monks and dealing with, e.g., institutional sex abuse issues in my professional life, was harder for me to deal with than the Nazi stuff.
Please say more about that! I was wondering to some extent how/whether we were meant to perceive the clear threat that Maria posed to the other nuns. “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria” is QUITE the song, when you realize that the problem we’re talking about is an extremely chaste young woman who loves to sing in the mountains. I mean, yikes, have you seen (or better yet read) The Decameron? If Maria is your problem (and not, say, nuns secretly sleeping with the gardener because they think he’s mute and can’t tell anyone) then your problem is the possibility that other nuns might find out how insane it is to claim that it’s sinful to sing or whatever.
Yeah. I have a lot of thoughts on that, though I’m not sure they go anywhere. I guess I need to disregard sex abuse and physical abuse issues - #notallnuns.
I think we’re meant to see that as the nuns understanding that Maria’s personality isn’t compatible with their lifestyle. I mean, this is a group of people for whom “Climb Every Mountain” literally means imprisoning themselves and denying themselves basic pleasures so they can talk to the sky man. They’re not climbing every mountain. I’m sure if I were more respectful of religious belief I would accept that to them, worshipping their god in this extremely proscribed way is just as exciting as whatever Maria does. But I am not that respectful of their beliefs and choices; I doubt the sincerity of the vast majority of individuals who choose a theoretically celibate religious life.
I don’t think the nuns believe Maria is sinful at all - they clearly really like her a lot. But they can’t envision their community incorporating people who don’t subscribe to the same rigorous rule-following, even if the rule-breaking behavior is in its way respectful of people and worshipful of their god. Or particularly if! The Decameron suggests a shared understanding of values; we all acknowledge that the nuns having sex and whatnot is supposed to be transgressive, whether you think it’s immoral or not. The problem here is that nothing about what Maria does seems transgressive in any meaningful sense, and so you’re left feeling like the nuns just impose these rules on themselves for reasons that I, at least, can’t relate to.
Ok, so setting aside the themes of Nazism and Catholicism, my consistent critique of the film itself on its own terms is that the changes of heart happen improbably quickly. TO WIT:
1. The seven (!!!!!!!) nightmare children who have driven away governesses in the double digits go from surreptitiously putting toads in Maria’s pockets to RACING into her bedroom for comfort during a thunderstorm and becoming her best friends and her Favorite Things in...ONE NIGHT?
The magic of the montage. Yeah. The movie has very weird pacing. It will be super in-the-moment and then skip several weeks ahead.
2. The sixteen-year-old Liesl who introduces herself by saying to her new governess “I don’t need a governess” becomes said governess’s gal pal, both trusting her implicitly with her teenage romantic secrets and openly admitting that maybe she doesn’t know everything (sixteen-year-olds whose mothers are dead are not known for any of these behaviors) in...ONE NIGHT (the same night).
Yes. The whole Liesl/Rolph plotline seemed like it was missing a scene or two. You really don’t see transformation in Rolph--he’s loverboy, and then he’s a Nazi, and but for a slight hesitation before trying to murder Captain von Trapp, he really doesn’t see much conflict in his intentions. I’m not sure whether we’re supposed to see that as a character arc at all, much less what meaning we draw from it. I guess it’s that Nazis fuck too.
3. All the children are THRILLED that their father is marrying Maria, and there is no talk of the loss of their mother, nor is there any reluctance to call Maria “mother” (again, speaking from experience, no). Our daughter astutely observed LONG before the wedding, watching Maria sing with the children, “I think she’s becoming their mother.” Yup, and everyone’s down with it!
Yes. Although Maria sure did seem more pleasant than Baroness Schroeder. I bet she was less fun in bed though.
Poor Baroness Schroeder can’t catch a ball to save her life, either.
4. Speaking of which! Baroness Schroeder makes a pretty half-hearted attempt to get rid of Maria just before intermission, and it only works because the nuns have already done the work of instilling a crushing sense of shame in Maria at the thought of a man finding her attractive. So Maria runs away, a nun sings a song, she comes back, and Baroness Schroeder is like “Well, I gave it my best shot, bye.” Which, power to her!! But just a few scenes earlier she was talking to Max about shipping the kids off to boarding school. It’s like Rodgers and Hammerstein wanted her to be a little bit of a conniving witch, but then they wanted her out of the way immediately once the nun song got Maria back on scene.
She’s barely a person. We never get her thoughts (or any woman’s thoughts) on the Nazis, either.
5. The stern, granite-faced, ice-cold Captain Von Trapp who summons his children with bespoke whistle blasts rather than calling them by their actual given names, who has allowed no music in his house for over a year (yeah, how long has it been since his wife died? It’s a bit squishy), and who seems to genuinely loathe fun à la Mr. Banks in Mary Poppins, goes from Team Why The Fuck Are My Children Wearing Curtains to Team Maria Is The Best in like four shots, just from hearing his children sing one song, which he apparently also knows the words to. OKAY.
Yeah. Very abrupt. Again I think that goes to pacing - he returns from a month in Vienna and he talks to the Baroness about how she helped him open up, and that’s really the only transitional moment before that one song where his heart melts and he’s a totally different person for the rest of the film.
And yet, even as I heard the strains of the song coming from inside the house, saw Von Trapp’s face change, saw the way he walked in a trance into the room where his children were singing and thought to myself, “man, that’s all it took??” I felt my eyes well up with tears and my grinchy, cynical heart grow three sizes. The children’s seven-part harmony really is beautiful, and Plummer really plays the hell out of it. And the comparison to Mary Poppins isn’t fair, even though they are both insanely long movies starring Julie Andrews that blow their wads up front, unless you really love “Step In Time.” Banks is a financial curmudgeon (ha!) while Von Trapp is a military curmudgeon who is also grieving, and his curmudgeonliness is where he has retreated in his grief. And you know what, I’m not actually mad about a movie in which a man listens to a woman when she says “hey, you’re emotionally closed off and it’s maybe not healthy for your children” and actually changes his ways, though it’s perhaps unhelpful that he basically flips a switch and the work is done.
I guess so. I think the makers of the film were pretty conscious of the parallels to Mary Poppins, down to snapping up Julie Andrews. And again - it’s a formula. Maria is a classic Rodgers and Hammerstein heroine and close to a manic pixie dream girl. She helps Captain von Trapp grow into a big happy boy. It’s just a little more complicated than your typical MPDG movie in that it’s based on a true story and there are nuns and Nazis and so on, which there were, in real life. But I still feel that Captain von Trapp has a richer interior life than Maria. We never actually get Maria’s thoughts on the Nazis. Her character arc really ends at the wedding.
No thoughts on Nazis, just a concerned face and a nurturing arm around poor Captain von Trapp. And yeah, her character arc is that she discovers she was put on earth to be a wife and mother, basically. We know nothing else about her, and I guess we don’t care!
While I can’t help noticing these things and rolling my eyes a bit at how neatly the familial conflicts get resolved, the actors really sell it and I can’t stay mad. There were MANY things that took me out of this movie, most of which I have now ranted about, but the strength of Julie Andrews and Christopher Piummer and many of the genuinely lovely songs pulled me right back in, a number of times. I feel like I’ve been pretty hard on it, so I would like to stress that overall, I really enjoyed watching the first...two thirds of it!
So if we are grading on a curve, comparing this movie to other movies that follow this formula, what do we think of it? Did this movie improve upon the formula? Did later movies in turn improve upon it?
Well of course later films get to tweak and critique the formula based on what’s come before, and I think you and I enjoy that kind of artistic dialogue, and so I assume that’s what you mean by grading on a curve. So for instance, Moana I think is a much better movie musical than Sound of Music, but Moana certainly owes a debt to the formula established by Sound of Music among others. It even comments on that.
One of the many reasons why Moana is so good - it isn’t afraid of you talking about it in this way! It invites that!
Yes. I think there’s no denying that the music in Sound of Music is really great. And the direction, the cinematography, pretty good. I really like the shots of Salzburg and the mountains. The acting, across the board, really good. Certainly agreed as to Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer.
That said, I think there are many, many better musicals. I think Rodgers and Hammerstein generally do a piss-poor job of mixing the lighter and darker elements of their plots and characters. Like, have you seen Oklahoma!?
Oh god. I’m just a girl who can’t say no!
It’s a lighthearted country romp where people try to convince someone to commit suicide through song. (Also, talk about ignoring the story about the state of Oklahoma - but that’s a revisionist take I guess.) I think Rodgers and Hammerstein really have two modes for their characters, treacly sweet and simple evil. They’re not about nuance.
It’s a weird and unsatisfying emotional palette. And I think we get that here, for all the reasons discussed above.
And the Nazi stuff gives me pause. I guess I need to talk about that.
Ah, I was hoping you would say that.
Ha, good! Like I said, I don’t need every movie set in that era to be Schindler’s List. At the same time, any movie set in that time and place needs to deal with the Nazis and the holocaust sincerely, because there is no integrity to any character’s emotional development within the story if they don’t. For the same reason, it’s hard to watch Gone With the Wind these days.
True story: my dad wrote me a very sheepish email about a month ago apologizing for showing me Gone With The Wind when I was a kid (and also for encouraging me to read the book). That was our shit! And neither of us feels good about it now!
I mean, jeez I sure am sorry that enslaver had a shitty love life for a short period during the war. And I wonder if future generations will be similarly outraged by current films’ treatment of climate change - or some other genocide we’re not even aware of. I mean, I know they will.
So the question is, is the treatment of the Nazis in this film sincere enough not to undermine the character story. And I think it certainly could be worse, but there’s not enough. I don’t like that Maria never comments on the Nazis.
Yes, that also struck me as weird - if you wanted to you could read her wordless expressions in ALL KINDS OF WAYS, right? Does she just go along with Captain von Trapp’s defection because he’s her husband and he’s in charge now? Would she have raised any objection if he were more of Max’s persuasion and figured he ought to just go along to get along?
She has no agency in that part of the story. Her story arc is that she thinks she’s going to be a nun, and then she falls in love and changes her mind. I’m sure lots of people fell in love under interesting circumstances in Austria in 1938, and from both a moral and artistic perspective I think that any story about those people, that does not incorporate their views and responses to Nazism, just can’t be an honest or compelling story.
So like I said, it’s not a totally fair comparison, but I do think some films have done it better. Moana is a story about a woman who has an interior life, fights climate change, and becomes a leader and an adventurer. It’s almost entirely within the formula, except it’s not about a woman becoming a wife. You can make similar arguments about Frozen and Brave and to varying extents, most of the Disney princess movies of the last 15 years.
Going back in time is a bit more equitable. I think Wizard of Oz and West Side Story both compete effectively on music and direction, and do better with character development. West Side Story really does engage with racism, though I’m sure not perfectly. And last, I’m always a sucker for self-consciously blowing up the formula, and so I really do feel that South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut is one of the finest movie musicals ever made. It is at the very least not treacly sweet. And it deals pretty sincerely, if profanely, with some major social issues, even if (or, because) they’re the nonsense social panic issues of the 1990s.
I don’t know if you feel this way, but I do think it’s hard to be fair to older movies for the reason you’re talking about. So many others have done interesting and provocative and self-conscious things with musical theater, from Sondheim, who still does a lot that’s quite traditional, to our beloved Documentary Now! to the fabulous and still in my opinion criminally underrated Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Now, none of these things are really remotely alike; Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a TV series that aired on the CW, for god’s sake, which arguably disqualifies it from this discussion, while the “Co-Op: The Musical” episode of Documentary Now! isn’t a real musical at all, but rather a parody of the documentary made about the studio recording of Company (am I getting that right?).
Yes.
And given the choice between The Sound of Music soundtrack and the ”Co-Op” soundtrack, I think I know which one you’d rather listen to in the car on our next road trip. And just writing about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend makes me want to go listen to every song right now.
And let’s not forget that our five-year-old can sing every word to the soundtrack of the musical SiX, including Anne Boleyn’s line (presumably directed at Catherine of Aragon): “He doesn’t wanna bang you/somebody hang you.” It’s definitely making an argument for its place in the canon of subversive musical theater.
Eh. Profane and metaliterary, yes, but treacly feminist in its own way.
But that’s kind of my point: musical theater has spawned a whole lot of very fun and satirical and metaliterary material that both makes fun of the genre and elevates it at the same time. And for that reason I sometimes wonder if I am less prone to enjoy sincere and earnest musical theater, given that I have essentially subsisted on a diet of self-aware and subversive musical theater commentary (in musical theater form) for most of my adult life. The Sound of Music was the first musical I ever saw on Broadway, but the second one was Avenue Q, perhaps best known for the song “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist.” Am I basically doomed to roll my eyes at every Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-esque musical purely on the basis of its role in the establishment of the genre, which makes it uniquely unqualified to subvert the genre in any way?
At the same time, I actually have a pretty good track record in the area of assessing older pieces of art on their own merits without needing to compare them to later and more reactionary pieces. I mentioned The Decameron before, and that text is uncontroversially foundational within the Western canon, and it spawned a long tradition of imitations and critiques, many of them very good and clever (Christine de Pizan comes to mind, she wrote a pretty convincing refutation of Boccaccio’s women in The Book of the City of Ladies). But for me, there has never been any work that has taken away the power of The Decameron. So I ask myself why I am so willing to keep those books and yet so ready to throw Sound of Music under the bus just because the genre has evolved so much since its debut?
Maybe it’s Boccaccio himself that has made me so allergic to earnestness, but I feel like that’s a big part of it.
I think you need a foundation for any canon. But is Sound of Music really foundational? I’m not sure. There were great musicals before and after it. I guess it’s at or near the pinnacle of 1960s family-friendly music theater movies, along with Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady. But there were great musicals before and after. Sound of Music is not The Decameron.
I had a moment years ago when I was having a hard time connecting with some cousins of mine, who live far away and I saw as a kid maybe every other year. As adults we hung out once and couldn’t find much common ground. One of the things I observed was that when it came to film and tv I have a much wider frame of reference, I intellectualized everything more, and it made it hard to connect on a basic level. So like, they’d just seen The Da Vinci Code and thought it was really fun, and that was enough for them. And I did my best to connect with them on that, but I had not only read The Da Vinci Code and seen the movie, I’d read up on the theories and history behind it and then I’d read Foucault’s Pendulum, which is basically about people who obsess over conspiracy theories like the kind featured in The Da Vinci Code, and the insane effect that has on human history. It’s a mystery thriller about mystery thrillers. To enjoy that you have to be willing to intellectualize the mystery thriller genre, and get very into your art history (and political history), and it’s not for everyone. But once you’ve gone down that path, how do you have a conversation about, I don’t know, how hot is the actress who plays Sophie? Yeah, I’d bang her. Good chat, bro.
So that’s to say - don’t you feel like that’s a fundamental question of perspective? I think that’s really something we connect on, this idea that art is a dialogue between artists and the audience and various artists and audiences over time. Most art, like The Da Vinci Code, doesn’t really respond much to that kind of analysis, and you should be able to enjoy any story on its own terms. But I think it’s more fun to engage with the canon.
Yes, I think that’s right. And as I said in our Kane entry, I like works of art that invite me to engage with them on that level. Part of why my dad feels bad about Gone WIth The Wind is that we not only watched it, we did like a dramatic, scene by scene analysis of it, with a legal pad and notes and frequent pausing to discuss.
Oh, shit. I’m not sure I knew that part. You did deserve an apology.
We started doing this with films when I was probably 8 years old; I think Casablanca was our first, and it made a big impact on me, but GWTW came soon after. So it wasn’t just that he said “this movie tells an enjoyable story,” but more like “this movie is important, and it has a cultural significance that invites us to engage with it on this level and it deserves that from us.” And I do appreciate that he’s reconsidered that perspective. But I also feel like he taught me to watch movies like this, which is part of what led me down the path I eventually took as an adult. So, yes, it was definitely worthwhile for him to tell me that he has changed his mind about how much of a platform he would give Gone With The Wind in my at-home cultural education. But I respect that the lessons he was hoping to impart were actually more about how to watch a movie than the content of that movie in and of itself.
My mom did the same with us with museums. I was six years old and brought my coolest friend on a trip to a museum and she asked us to fill out forms rating the exhibits based on the presentation of the material. I haven’t talked to that guy in 26 years. But generally I do respect your dad for doing that with you, at age eight, with movies.
And as far as our perspective goes, I am of the opinion that it’s more fun to be an overthinker than an underthinker, and I think you agree. Like I said, I enjoyed watching Sound of Music, and I was genuinely riveted now and then. However, this is the part I am really in it for. I do think it’s a really fundamental part of our relationship, too, and I don’t know that we would have lasted past the college days had this not been something we shared. It’s so ingrained in our day-to-day conversations and our running dialogue with one another, and man, the pandemic has driven home how important that stuff is. One of the things I really liked about graduate school was that I was constantly in the company of people who thought about art like I did, and some of my best memories are of the get-togethers we had while preparing for our general exams. We’d set an agenda of works to discuss and then really just act like we were hanging out (which we were) talking about books among friends. Books were open, sometimes. Notes were jotted down here and there, when someone said something really good (and someone else would say “OOH that’s really good!”). I missed that a lot when I left graduate school and when we went to live in a state whose name starts with F.
Yeah. Fuck Florida.