burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

Eric continues to prove himself something of a geek.  The X-Men movies came up in conversation, and I get the impression that he grew up with the comics; he's also a big fan of the Spiderman movies.  He did not know Ian McKellan is gay, though, which surprised me.

Amanda and I went for a brief walk in the afternoon because the weather was so beautiful.  Bright blue sky, green grass, trees turning green-to-yellow, brick buildings -- a touch warm for real autumn, but still good.  I'm sad that we had an over-extended summer followed by a lot of rain and missed out on autumn.

I turned around a little after 4 and the light was soft yellow, streaming in on the walls and also lighting up the trees (whose leaves are already yellow).  It's a really nice view out that window -- hills, trees, grass, brick building.

Walking across the bridge to go home I saw one crew boat emerge from under the bridge and slice through the water which looked dark green&blue.  (Usually there are many boats -- and/or we're having weather -- so a single boat slicing through the calm water was unusual.)

Walking home from the train the nice lady on Hoyle whom I frequently see between home and train gave me candy.

The flist-as-Halloween-party-guests Hallomeme mostly bores me, but it did give me one too perfect not to post:
     ladyvivien dressed as Counselor Troi from "Star Trek".

Not nearly as good as The Shining as feel-good-movie, but I'm still impressed by West Side Story as horror movie.

No Inklings class today, so i was gonna do errands and stuff, but, um, so lazy. So now of course i am up until all hours. Look, it's a cycle or a balance or something and yeah, shutting up now. I did get grab&go lunch [so many people out on Chapin Lawn and the steps of the campus center and so on] and sit on the bench outside Neilson in the beautiful weather reading Mrs Dalloway and eating. The Tryon Trip has continued to be crazy right up until the last minute, but work was pretty lowkey for the most part, for which i was grateful.

I was radically ecumenical tonight, per usual. We talked about mercy trumping justice and Emily and i made references to Joel's classes. I miss having discussions with people. I was talking with oyceter recently about how much i used LJ for discussion when Whedon shows were airing, and i was thinking recently about how i used to have big involved discussions about stuff on my LJ. And now not so much. And i miss having real discussions with people.

I heart Ashley's tasteless joke. As "Well duh," instead of saying "Is the Pope Catholic?" saying "Is the Pope dead?"
Ashley says, "Steal it if you want, but use it before a new Pope is elected!"

I had forgotten how much i enjoy Harry and the Potters.

I'm done with ficathons for real this time. (Dear Ari: I haven't read your Ethan piece yet, but i heart the title. Just so you know.)

Emma! (Okay, so i already showed Emma, but the rest of you need to see them, too. I mean, everyone knows mpoetess=genius, right?) Also: puppet porn.

"Elizabeth's constant tone is a condescending tone." - Fefe Cat (though Fefe did woo me with ice cream)

Has anyone read sajinn? Because Emma and i were discussing some of zir fic, and now i'm curious as to whether anyone else has read any of it.

Allie was saying there seems to be an UberTraumaDrama around some issue every spring, and she's not particularly wrong -- there was Spring my first year and then there was the SGA constitution change which was still an issue the following year -- but i'm not sure there's anything this semester that really has a lot of students riled up about it in a divisive manner. If i had to pick now, i would say the conflict around the Clothesline Project. (Whose idea were the chalkings? I understand the concerns about the Clothesline Project being triggering, but the chalkings are way less ignorable. I was jarred by them, which i know was the point, but a large part of my being jarred was because i had been made aware of triggering-concerns and was thinking about how hard to avoid the chalkings were and how triggering they could be.)

Your trivia for the day is that "Whatever it is I'm against it" is from Horse Feathers (1932) -- Groucho Marx.

Song lyrics people didn't guess (some of which surprised me):
3. imagine if our world was blue and weightless - "Stranded" by Alien Ant Farm (played in "Seeing Red," BtVS 6.19)
4. I crawled out of the world - "Blue" by Angie Hart [cowritten with Joss Whedon] (played in "Conversations With Dead People," BtVS 7.07)
6. starin' at the cracks in the walls, 'cause I'm waiting for it all to come to an end - "Lonely Girl" by Pink
7. it's true that I stole your lighter - "Divorce Song" by Liz Phair
8. and does your conscience ever mention the way that you treat me - "Shrug" by Ani DiFranco

( internetage )

So, finishing The French Lieutenant's Woman at work on Monday was going to mean i got to sleep Monday night, but of course i caught up on LJ instead. And i was gonna make a Blackboard post, but it just didn't happen. I was like, "Sarah is crazy. Yes no maybe. Discuss." Yeah, it was bad.

I have MAT class during the Telling and Retelling film screening, which given my loathing of adaptations troubles me little. However, everyone seems to have hated the FLW movie, which makes me wanna watch it. I'm impressed with myself that i got the book read, but i kinda wish i could have read it more slowly, gotten more of the details. And dude, most obscure slash ever. (Thursday's presentation was on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. I have geek love.)

Oh, way to go online ordering. I picked up 12 books at the p.o. on Tuesday. [It makes me sad that one of them has an inscription dated 2001 of "Happy 19th Anniversary! Forever Yours"] I also have a shiny new (gold) check card.

I jumped into the commentary on Napoleon Dynamite in offbalance's journal, and was afraid it would go badly, but really i should have known better. As it turned out, the discussion enabled us both to better articulate our problems with the film and we turned out to actually be in agreement on a lot of things. And lo there was much rejoicing.

Conversation in wisdomeagle's journal about (un)popular fannish [Whedonverse] opinions was also good.

Imbolc, though not Groundhogs Day, makes it onto the Smith College Academic Planner for February 2. 6 weeks, what? I always forget that that's the long one. I live in New England, people. 6 weeks only brings us to the "official" end of winter, but New England winter often lasts beyond that.

Surprised by Joy got finished Tuesday night after all. Le bore. And, um, spiritual autobiography? Way more of a regular autobiography than one might have expected/hoped for. Plus, it makes me rather dislike Lewis, whom i had so wanted to like. And the ending? Dude, wtf? ::rages::

Class began with more of "Surprised by Joy: The Movie" (my title) which was worth watching only for the footage of Oxford (focus was on University, Keble, and Magdalen). Mostly i worked on rereading the last 2 chapters of Surprised by Joy to see if i'd missed something in the Conversion Narrative of Crap.

Then CZ did the usual (which Ruhi, listening to me at lunch, dubbed "call and response"). She asked us for items which contributed to Lewis' conversion and wrote each one on the board and talked about it for a few minutes before calling on the next person. There was one time a student said something and she disagreed and i was reminded of Lewis' talk about his father hearing what he thought you said and anyway i agreed with the student and wanted to discuss further but she called on someone else and we moved along.

She wondered aloud about how professors of Western Literature do it, how one can try to give a balance when Christianity so dominates amongs the big deal writers. This gave me an entry point to talk to her after class. I said that it's taught (and understood by many students) as a powerful narrative informing the works of these writers, so you learn a lot about the Christian narratives but it's not like you're being preached to. In contrast to how Lewis talks about always feeling like he has to keep the Christianity in the works of his beloved authors at bay. Yeah, Lewis is kind of psycho. He talks about Christianity pursuing him -- which is why i was surprised by a student mentioning him talking about free choice in his conversion. Yes, i said all that, and then i talked about how i was really frustrated about how the whole book he talks in great detail about everything and how it affected his spiritual growth and everything and then at the end it's basically "And then I converted. The end," and i was frustrated particularly because i'd heard about how he's so legalistic in his defense of Christianity and how he's written so many works of nonfiction with rational arguments for Christianity but the end of Surprised by Joy is such a cop-out and i was so angry. I think i ranted for a good solid 10 minutes. And i could feel the tears in my eyes -- because i had been so furious when i finished the previous night, and i hadn't had any opportunity to properly vent (3 handwritten pages in my reader response journal before i quit, but that didn't have quite the calming effect that actually talking to someone would have). She was glad that someone had such a "fiery" reaction to the book. Oh, and i politely mentioned my dislike for the fact that we have spent so much classtime that could be used for discussion instead watching a video that doesn't tell us much new. And after all this we chatted a bit about the stuff i wanna do in grad school, about stories that get told and retold. So yeah, i felt better.

I was also comforted by an e-mail she sent to the class later that night:

Subject: surprised by the ending of SURPRISED BY JOY?

Dear Inklings,

Thanks for a great class, and for the fascinating entries on Blackboard.

I had an interesting conversation with two Inklings members after class, who said they found the ending of Surprised by Joy a major letdown. After describing in such detail his childhood intimations of joy, his schoolboy pursuits and travails, his atheism and flirtation with the occult, and even his journey to theism, Lewis reveals very little about his grounds for belief in the Christian gospel. He takes us to threshold and drops us there. Why does he clam up at this point?

Also - Why does he speak of being pursued by the Christian God? (even here, one senses a literary imagination at work -- recalling Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven")

Come to think of it, while he has his reader's attention, why doesn't he try to make a convincing case for Christianity? What is the real aim of this book?

I'd like to hear others' views on this during the first ten or fifteen minutes of class Monday.
We'll also have a chance to return to some of these questions when we read Mere Christianity.

And from a later e-mail

Monday February 7
FIRST TWENTY OR THIRTY MINUTES:
Discuss the last two chapters of SURPRISED BY JOY ("Checkmate" and "The Beginning"). We'll pay special attention to the three "moves" in the chess match which Lewis says brought him to Theism. And we'll consider the way his narrative changes (becoming more suggestive and even cryptic) once he begins to describe the move from Theism to Christian belief.
REST OF CLASS:
We'll begin our discussion of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Please read the first nine chapters for Monday.

Weds. Feb 9
We'll continue discussion of LWW. Please read the rest of the book for Wednesday.

You will notice, I'm sure, the connection between the Socratic Professor Kirke in LWW and Lewis's tutor Kirk (Kirkpatrick, or the Great Knock). ("What DO they teach them in school?")

We got our presentation assignments and not only am i doing mine on my own (she had been talking about pairs, which some of them are) but mine is on "C. S. Lewis' Latin correspondence with the Catholic priest Don Giovanni Calabria." How perfect. (And other presentations include The Screwtape Letters, The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis' debate with Elizabeth Anscombe, and Tolkien in popular culture.) I think i'm doing my Lewis paper on C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot, and my Tolkien paper on Arthurian legend in LotR.

Me on Wednesday's dessert: "It's good but not great. I mean, it's just puff pastry with vanilla ice cream and Hershey's syrup."
Cat: "You make it sound so vulgar."
Kate: "You make everything sound vulgar, Elizabeth. It's your gift."

I missed RCFOS (if there was any this week) for

Robert Rosenblum, professor of fine arts, New York University, will present "The Art of Reincarnation: Picasso and Old-Master Portraiture," the second annual Dulcy B. Miller Lecture in Art and Art History on Wednesday, February 2, at 7 p.m. in Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall. The talk will offer a survey of Picasso’s life-long interest in portraiture and the particular ways in which he resurrects portraits from the annals of art history—works by El Greco, Velazquez, Goya, Ingres, Delacroix, and Manet—and transforms them into the friends, wives and mistresses of his own life.

Quite good, though sadly i was dozing off by the end (sleep-deprived in a dimly lit room...). Listening to Suzannah's introduction, i found myself wishing i had taken art history classes classes, so that i would have more narratives to draw on. And almost immediately in his talk, Rosenblum used the terms "quotations" and "paraphrase," and later on he talked about "translating into one's own language." Most of the artists he talked about (Old Masters i hadn't previously heard of, or contemporaries of Picasso also positioning themselves in an Old Masters tradition) had foreign names i couldn't quite transliterate, so i can't do much of a bullet list.
My favorite bit was that Picasso's "Weeping Woman" is often associated with his Guernica for obvious reasons, but it also draws on imagery of Our Lady of Sorrows, and later there's a sketch of Jacqueline Rocque which very clearly combines the two.
Other notes:
There's a painting of Jacqueline as Manet's Spanish dancer Lola (which also says interesting things about inserting people into nationalistic traditions).
This Picasso self-portrait is like Cezanne. Apparently he often did a painting in homage to an Old Master when one died. There's one that so echoes Gaugin's Spirit of Death Watching.
His portrait of Gertrude Stein was similar to some portraits of hulky men of state, and apparently Picasso joked a lot about her lesbianism and so she's usurping the male throne so to speak.
He also has a woman in an amchair and a woman with her finger on her temple (there are a bunch of these, actually) that echo somebody else -- tthe Ang (sp?) guy Rosenblum talked a lot about, i think.

The article (Robert A. Georges and Michael Owen Jones, Chapter 3, "Survival, Continuity, Revival, and Historical Source, from Folkloristics, 1995, pp. 59-89) we read for this week's seminar was largely rather lame. Example: The article begins with talk about ballads drawing on folklore, which we're going to spend some class sessions on later in the semester and which i'm actually interested in, but stuff like Animals can speak in ballads, notes [Evelyn Kendrick] Wells [in The Ballad Tree], a "vestige of" tometimistic belief in a kinship between them and human beings makes me wanna hit things.

We also read Jan Brunvand's The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings, a book on urban legends as folklore. One of the discussion questions was

Does Brunvand's research and analysis of urban legends dissuade you from whatever truth you thought/think the tales contain(ed)? Do you believe that the legends grow out of documented or real incidents (for example the Mouse in the Coke and "Alligators in Sewers") or rather (as the author demonstrates so many times) have no discernable origins that we can detect? Do we care whether or not urban legends have a basis in reality, choosing to believe or enjoy them out of a "morbid curiosity" to "satisfy our sensation-seeking minds"? Is that truly the appeal behind the legends?

I am far too factually minded. I feel uncomfortable saying "I've heard..." or "Someone told me..." about anything, always feel the compulsion to fact-check it (though i don't always actually do so). And honestly, most urban legends don't interest me. Either they're obviously fictitious scary stories to be told over campfires or at sleepovers or they just sound like unfactchecked news items (e.g. finding a dead animal in one's food).

Simply becoming aware of this modern folklore which we all possess to some degree is a revelation in itself, but going beyond this to compare the tales, isolate their consistent themes, and relate them to the rest of the culture can yield rich insights into the state of our current civilization.
-page 2

That's the only aspect of urban legends that really interests me.

Legends can survive in our culture as living narrative folk lore if they contain three essential elements: a strong basic story-appeal, a foundation in actual belief, and a meaningful message or "moral."
-page 10

First, it is simply traditional to listen to and to appreciate a good story without undue questioning of its premises. Second, "belief" in an item of folklore is not of the same kind as believing the earth is round or that gravity exists. A "true story: is first and foremost a story, not an axiom of science. And third, the legends fulfill needs of warning (don't park!), explanations (what may happen to those who do), and rationalization (you can't really expect sensational bargains not to have strings attached); these needs transcend any need to know the absolute truth., The appeal and durability of a superb morbid mystery tale is as strong in folklore as in fiction or film, and the significance of a "folk" telling of such events can be as great for a scholar as its appearance in a popular-culture medium or its literature.
-on why urban legends don't get debunked (page 22)

A lot of the book was psychosexual explanations of urban legends, which i'm not a huge fan of, but it was food for thought anyway. (The less psychosexual explanations tended to be the rather commonsense ones that one doesn't need to read a book to think of.) And it was neat to learn that some urban legends have antecedents from ages back (the spider in the hairdo story for example; page 78: a 13th century tale of a woman vain of her hair upon whom the devil descended in the form of a spider).

As if the life history of this legend is not baffling enough, consider that there is a prototypical "Vanishing Hitchhiker" story (not the true ancestor of our legend) in the New Testament in which the Apostle Philip baptizes an Ethiopian who picks him up in a chariot, then disappears (see Acts 8:26-39).
-page 39

::loves:: (And it doesn't hurt that that's one urban legend i'm actually rather fond of.)

The Tatar radio interview started out as a review of stuff i knew, but there was some new stuff as well, so it wasn't a total waste of my hour. She talked about how a lot of the boys are simpletons and a lot of the girls are go-getters, and how various cultures have cinder-lad stories and Germany might well have had them. She said that in the Grimms tales there's always the child as survivor while HCA's are so tragic -- like The Little Match Girl, and she says it's important in a child story that child hero survive. She said that reading fairy tales is a way back into childhood for adults and way to mature for children. She said that good bedtime stories are exciting, and that that's one of her new projects (the sort of tension between the fact that you're reading kids this stuff to get them ready to sleep and the fact that stories they're gonna like are typically gonna be exciting), the other one being "wonder" in children's lit -- Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. They talked about stuff the whole family reads, with Tatar mentioning Harry Potter, Lenson saying he ran out of gas when they passed 700 pages and mentioning Lord of the Rings from his childhood and Tara mentioning Narnia. Minutes before the end of the broadcast Lenson mentioned fanfiction!!! He asked Tatar if she had heard of it and she had not. He said that readers of stuff like Harry Potter, "They decide they wish they'd written it. And so they do." They write novels, he said. He said he'd never heard of it until one of my students [he's a Comp-Lit professor at UMass Amherst] proposed writing a senior honors thesis on fanfiction. (From his tone, it sounded like he denied said student, but of course i e-mailed him.) Those who say literacy and writing is on the way out are wrong, he said, and Tatar agreed and mentioned book clubs. And at the close of the broadcast, he he encouraged the listeners to buy her new book from your local 'independent, co-dependent, or chemically dependent, but not regular dependent bookstore.'

I luff my daddy. He told the story of a new teacher at NHS mentioning, "My passport says I'm male." and then says, And I almost said, totally seriously, "Did you used to be?" (she's short and "feminine-looking" but she had a number of years between college and starting teaching at NHS so who knows what happened then?) But I didn't, cause I figured she might not take it in the spirit I meant.

And there's an out lesbian at my high school? I'm impressed.

More from my dad:

• Perhaps I just notice unusual things, but in last night's State of the Union address, Bush seemed to be going out of his way to justify his foreign policy on the basis that it helped women. Perhaps someone on the writing staff had read this.
  
• outside the box thinking - well, outside most people's conceptual boxes

---

ats_nolimits 6.10: Girls' Night Out by ladycat777 and mpoetess
The title alone is enough to hook me (which isn't to imply that i don't read every episode anyway) and having read, i approve. Muchly.

Oh, and reccing fic reminds me that i got my website up on February 1 and didn't do a grand pimp because my inner perfectionist is cringing, but i suppose i really should put it out there. Me and the Text. Fics and recs and nothing political that you haven't seen before (assuming you've been here before). I have much love for the setup of Doyle's recs page, but i'm not sure i have the patience to go through and do mine that way. Or the time, really. I know my non-fandom time would be better spent writing feedback and recs blurbs than recoding a huge chunk of my website. Maybe it can be a summer project.

Oh, and amproof wants a rec of your favorite fic of your own.

Eowyn and Theoden vid to Tori Amos' "Winter" by wolfling and mogigraphia
I barely remember the story from the book, but i think the vid is the synopsized version, and anyway it made me cry (not like that's difficult to do).

One ficathon i'm not signing up for but whose concept i enjoy: The Gay (and Lesbian and Het) Sex Challenge
You get dealt 3 playing cards with sex positions on them and write a fic using one of those positions.

doyle_sb4 is an evil enabler. *looks at stagesoflove and 30_kisses* Though i think i'll just bookmark them for the ideas rather than actually signing up.

Who's done that "10 Things You Want to See More of in Fic" thing? I've seen 4 lists so far (doyle_sb4, jennyo, musesfool, fabu) and am culling from these and working on my own list. It's not like i don't have enough fic to work on, but i like the ideas (plus the idea of getting to point someone to a fic and say "See, it includes on of your ten" gives me a happy).

Every now and again people write me kind letters letting me know just how much they'd like my job. On a day like today, I'd happily take their job. Even if it involves heavy lifting, standing around in the cold, or telling people they can't park there. Honest.
-Neil Gaiman

My UPenn app is ready to be mailed out in the morning. I am convinced that it is horrible and i won't get in anywhere. I am not particularly stressed out about this, however. (I have 3 more apps to finish over the Break, but UPenn is the place i really wanna be.)
Anyone who wants to read 10 pages about sacrifice, chosen-ness, and covenant (circumcision mostly) in the Old Testament with focus on the aqedah and some discussion of Jesus followed by 9 pages about BtVS with spoilers through the finale and some mention of Angel can feel free to request a copy of "Sacrifice and Chosen-ness from the Israelites to Sunnydale: The Aqedah, Jesus, and Buffy Summers." [My reread of the paper has convinced me it is horrible, but i'm still a big whore.]

Now all that remains is rewriting my Shakespeare paper and studying for (and taking, obviously) my Bible exam. Damn. And Secret Slasha is due on Sunday, so i have to finish that, too.

Today [Tuesday] was the last day of classes. In DSS (my one class) the prof mentioned how we've been talking a lot about the pesher [ "Interpreted, this means..."] technique a lot this semester and pointed us to the opening of 1 John 2:18:
     Children, it is the last hour!

I pointed out the rest of the verse, and declared it to be about the final exams/papers we have in many classes.
     As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. From this we know it is the last hour.

Christine then picked up on verse 19, calling it a reference to the MHC students in our class (of whom she is one).
     They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us.

And lastly, Biz picked up on verse 20:
     But you have been annointed by the Holy One; and all of you have knowledge.

In other news...
I have weird dreams when i get enough sleep. [When i'm not getting enough sleep, i wake up with no recollection of my dreams.] ( like you care )

Weird to think that i will be at Smith from January 2 - May 15 (excluding the week of Spring Break: March 12-20) and then gone forever. Kate and Emma have all these movies that apparently i not only need to see but i need to see with them. And of all the ones that came up in Friday night's discussion thereon, Blade Runner is the one Emma says i don't get veto power on. If it's really that important to her, i'll watch it 'cause you tie me to a couch and all you plan to do is watch a movie, where's the fun in that? but really, of all the movies....

Emma finished watching Firefly tonight, in the company of me and Kathy of course. I hate Tracey, but i cried at the beginning of "The Message." Also: Inara in that opening scene = omgsohot. Tonight's instances of SFF cross-polination: Womack=Jim from Sentinel and Nandi in "Heart of Gold" is from a Xena arc.

We stopped by Midnight Madness, which wasn't great, but it was a beautiful night. Clear sky for once, and winter brisk but not capslock cold (though i'm me and not entirely allowed to make temperature pronouncements).

And i'm never gonna finish writing and posting a detailed weekend update, but that's okay. Lessee.... anything i haven't mentioned? Oh, for the Advent Sunday of Joy, the First Churches service on Sunday was very disappointing. There was an interpretive dance, though. And that night i made myself a joy list, so that made me feel better. And Emily wrote a beautiful post about lights in the darkness and Advent and Hannukah. Oh, and i went to the end-of-semester Spanish 230 performances Tuesday afternoon, which were neat, though i was once again reminded how poor my Spanish is.

Recs:
fic: Giles meets Randall and Ethan for the first time
vid: "Mr. Bright Side" by The Killers (Angel-centric)

Pimping:
Gile ficathon if anyone who hasn't already heard is interested.
Request for "good, long, online comics" (details in post).

Other:
I'm not that evil, but yeah.
[And hey, want really depressing? Neil Gaiman's "Nicholas Was..." from Smoke and Mirrors.]

( :) )