"and what i learned is: grass really grows slow..."

[hermionesviolin]

The French Lieutenant's Woman is nigh on 500 pages and of course i spent Thursday night working on the My Fic section of my website and then a good chunk of Friday working on the icons section. (P.S. Am i right that this shot is from when Callisto is in Xena's body?) The millions of hours of coding/uploading before me were suddenly more compelling than my actual homework. Eep. My self-imposed February 1 deadline (go-live date) has been good for making me really get stuff done, but it has also made website stuff feel more pressing than regular homework since there was an actual deadline -- though i did resign myself to certain (website) things not getting done by February 1. And i did a lot of alternating between activities, so ultimately schoolwork and website got accomplished, though my inner perfectionist is complaining.

I have so many assignments of varying deadlines (presentations, papers, Blackboard postings, reader responses) that my biggest worry for the semester is not getting all the reading done but rather losing track of my assignments and not doing some of them. So yeah, i actually did up a list for myself. All the due dates are in my planner, but i also wanted a complete list of assignments since one class has weekly postings and two have short papers due at one's leisure during the course of the semester. I should really do Blackboard postings and reader responses early in the semester as most of my presentations (not to mention my seminar paper) are later. April's gonna be real fun.

Anyway, we were to read the first 7 chapters of Surprised by Joy for Monday and the rest for Wednesday, and i did manage the first 7 chapters Friday night. I was up so late that i considered doing another all-nighter but i decided it was a better idea to put of Macbeth until after some sleep, which was a good idea.

     "Charles! Now Charles, you may be as dry a stick as you like with everyone else. But you must not be stick-y with me."
     "Then how, dear girl, are we ever to be glued together in holy matrimony?"
     "And you will keep your low humor for your club."
-The French Lieutenant's Woman (John Fowles)

Saturday night i went with hedy to the Catie Curtis concert at JMG.
She opened with "Saint Lucy" (Dreaming in Romance Languages, 2004) and then "Patience" (My Shirt Looks Good on You, 2001).
She said she and her partner have an adopted 2½ year old little girl and just adopted a 7 month old girl from Guatemala and there were anecdotes and then she said something like "Now i'm gonna do this song from before all that" so i was expecting "Love Takes the Best of You" (written when friends of theirs adopted a child) but instead she did "Elizabeth" -- her love song to her partner, which of course is my favorite song.
She talked a little bit about the Buster Bunny thing and said that if the Secretary of Education was going to try to cut down gay content, she was gonna up hers, so here was what she called her gay anthem, so i was expecting "What's the Matter" (which i love and which she played later) but instead she played "Honest World" from Acoustic Valentine, which i'm less thrilled with, though the jumping the broom imagery is powerful and well-articulated.
She sang "Long Night Moon" which included a magnolia reference and her encore was "Magnolia Street" followed by "Kiss That Counted." (I always think that You say, "It must be 4 AM," and I say, "If I don't kiss you now, I will never sleep again" is a part of "Magnolia Street.")
They did Mark Sandman's "The Night" (and looking at the My Shirt Looks Good On You booklet, i see "Patience" is written by, and recorded in memory of Mark Sandman) and i was mentally fanvidding.
They did "Hold On" (Everyone we know is breaking up this year...) and "Red Light" from the new album and "The World Don't Owe Me" from A Crash Course in Roses (1999) and other stuff that i didn't know or don't remember.
Oh, and she talked about being on an Olivia Cruise where they happened to be filming The L Word and deciding to write a song to pitch to The L Word and so she played us the song she wrote: "Stranger" i think it was called -- which strikes me as such an L Word song (though i haven't actually watched the show) and which i also rather like.

Also: The Naked I: Monologues from Beyond the Binary. 7pm Tuesday February 15 at UMass Student Union Ballroom (free admission). The production at Smith had a stunning cast, so a small part of me worries about being disappointed, about having my wonderful memories polluted with an inferior production, but i still really wanna go. So i will.

And Judth Halberstam (author of such works as Female Masculinity) is giving a talk in Neilson Browsing Room Thursday February 24 from 4-7pm. Apparently Spectrum's sponsoring a Queer Lecture Series this semester.

At the table I could forgive much insipidity in my food more easily than the least suspicion of what seemed to me excessive or inappropriate seasoning. In the course of life I could put up with any amount of monotony far more patiently than even the smallest disturbance, bother, bustle, or what the Scotch call kurfuffle. Never at any age did I clamour to be amused; always and at all ages (where I dared) I hotly demanded not to be interrupted.
-Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis

The final hymn at church on Sunday was "Here I Am Lord," which sounded familiar but which i don't think i'd ever paid attention to the words of before. I really really like it. Words and music, which doesn't always happen. The lyrics link i found cited Genesis 46:2, but i was thinking of Isaiah as we sang it (the hymnal didn't cite anything) with the whole hot coal imagery which is so powerful.

Liza and i finally pinned down a time to get together. And Peter wants to do something with me in May during a service (Graduation Sunday, ideally, assuming i don't have commitments) to let the church say goodbye to me. Tres sweet.

Hmm, if hedy and i went to NYC for a weekend to see Wicked i could see my Park Slope folks.

'Twas her birthday on Sunday, so around 8 we went to Tunnel Bar and i got the glass of Riesling i'd been wanting since last New Years. Mmm, sweet white wine.
We also both ordered the Strawberries D'Amour: Fresh strawberries and ladyfingers ready for dipping in a warm Swiss chocolate sauce.
Mmm, sex. (Note to self: bring spoon.)
Chocolate martini wouldn't have occurred to me to invent but it was good. If i had a million of-age friends, i would insist that we go there some night and each get a flavored martini and we could all try each others'.
voz_de_soledad and i should hang out sometime.
My favorite quote of mine from the night was "Your hair is pretty, but mine is just kinda there."
But the best quote of the night was obviously "Evil and made of bugs."

A couple drunk first-years wandered into my room Saturday night -- and were later apologetic about the imposition. Really, i like hanging out with people. No need to apologize. Sure, i prefer sober company, but they were hardly obnoxious drunks.

Linda returned my facebook message and i have been remiss in responding, but given how long it took her to respond i don't feel guilty. I am accumulating a list of people to e-mail/facebook message.

Chomsky: The film opens with Galadriel speaking. "The world has changed," she tells us, "I can feel it in the water." She's actually stealing a line from the non-human Treebeard. He says this to Merry and Pippin in The Two Towers, the novel. Already we can see who is going to be privileged by this narrative and who is not.
-The unused Noam Chomsky-Howard Zinn commentary on the FotR:EE dvd

E-mail from the Inklings prof:

Dear Inklings,

A reminder - please bring your reader's journal to class tomorrow and always!

What to put in your reader's journal? It's entirely up to you. The important thing is to write as you read. But here are some suggestions:

Quotations that seem remarkable, puzzling, revealing, beautiful, peculiar, etc. (with the page number in parentheses)

Quick comments, flashes of insights, questions, bright bits of analysis, perhaps prompted by the quotations you include.

Lists: of works cited, of characters, of recurrent metaphors, of prevailing themes.

Notes on the characters who strike you as important, and on their relationship to the central figure or figures.

Quotations from other relevant sources; e.g. a letter that provides an interpretive clue.

Drawings or maps. A chronology of events. A glossary. A menu of food and drinks consumed.

cz

In class on Tuesday, omg, wanted to stab her. Last week we read Part 1 of Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings, which includes a condensed version of C. S. Lewis' biography. For this week we read Surprised by Joy, i.e. C. S. Lewis' Autobiography: The Longer Version. And then Tuesday's class began with 20 minutes of Hooper's video, i.e. dramatic readings of Surprised by Joy accompanied by summarial narration and pictures. I came this close to pulling out my notebook and working on my Lilah/Saffron fic. [Latest ficathon i really shouldn't sign up for is the BtVS/Firefly crossover ficathon.] I did actually pull out my MAT textbook to finish reading the Shakespeare section. (And MAT class for one continues to be good, incidentally.) And we spent the remaining 45 minutes or so of class talking about one single topic, doing the same thing we did last Wednesday where she solicits thoughts from the students, writes them on the board, and talks a lot. And yet she has these grandiose ideas about us covering a bajillion and one topics. Gee, somehow now i don't feel bad about the fact that i don't expect to finish Surprised by Joy for Wednesday's class. Hopefully once student presentations begin (leading discussion on the reading or presenting on a topic of special interest that is relevant to the course but not included in the required material) class will be better.

Education!Ann has only worked at SCMA for a month longer than i have. Craziness.

I have decided that Stacey is the Johnny Depp kind of hot. Some days are Ed Wood not particularly attractive. Some days are Pirates of the Caribbean omgsexnow. Some days are the classic (Edward Scissorhands, Benny and Joon) amazing.

Oh, and prompted by discussion with pardalis05 in moxiemuse's journal:

[Poll #428737]
And not that anyone but me cares, but

MR Squared
http://www.massreview.org/

Thursday, February 3: Maria Tatar, Dean of Humanities at Harvard University, on her new book, The Annotated Brother Grimm.

The show, hosted by David Lenson and Roger the Jas Pharmer, airs on Thursdays from 5:30-6:30 on WMUA, 91.1 FM on the UMass campus. For those of you who live at a distance, all WMUA programming is streamed at http://www.wmua.org/

Which Eddie Izzard "Dressed to Kill" line are you? by Saphyne
Username
Eddie Izzard quote:	"You’ve got a bad back, I’m gonna crack your bones. You’ve got diphtheria – I’m gonna crack your bones. Your head’s come off! I’m gonna crack your bones. It looks like your mother! I’m going to crack your bones."
Quiz created with MemeGen!