hermionesviolin: (big girl world)
I've gotta say, i really appreciate the validation of my post-graduation plans.  I get all stubborn independent "my life, therefore my opinion wins," but it's still comforting and strengthening to be affirmed, to have other people agree with me.  And Gillian and Briana both say i'll be the best date ever ;)

So anyway, Commencement Weekend.

Rehearsal Friday morning was lame.  It did give me a better idea of how the ceremony was gonna go, and Meg and i got to feel cool 'cause we know what "speech act" is [and it sounds so much like a marriage pronouncement, too -- "by the power vested in the Board of Trustees and delegated..."], and i enjoyed the projector images even though they were hard to see, but it wasn't tremendously helpful, and oh the stupid questions people asked.  There were i think 2 valid questions -- neither of which the woman was able to answer well (how early will the ITT be open if graduation is inside, and how are we supposed to do our graduation hoods).  Liked the German guy running things, though.  Afterward, we took the class picture on a steep grassy knoll, which was ever so much fun.  Lunch was good.  Danne gave me a rose.  I got a graduation card from a couple at First Churches whose faces i can't even think of to match with their names.

My parents arrived Friday evening and we went to see Six Characters in Search of an Author.  Well-acted.  Unsure how i feel about the play itself.  Interesting ideas about how no one else can really be you.  But characters in a play aren't actually existant persons, they're characters created to be performed by other people.  (As opposed to characters in books, who were created to exist within their own world and not to be embodied by other people.)  The immutable is more real?  Yes reality is always changing (as they say) but does that make the past an "illusion"?  Is saying "No, it's memory; that's different" a cop-out?

Ivy Day was Saturday morning.  Side-zipping dresses are a bitch, and i owe Poorn much love.  It was actually pretty.  (They should have told us the reason to arrive 45 minutes early was so that everyone could take pictures of us.  Have i mentioned how the Commencement/IvyDay rehearsal didn't actually include anything about Ivy Day?)  After all the processions, though, when we sat down and listened to people talk, i was cold and bored.  [When i said i wanted winter back, i didn't mean when i was sitting outside in a sleeveless dress.]  Reminiscent of Class Day.  The box lunch following was yum, and i first went home to change into real clothes, so sitting outside and eating was nice.

We went to SCMA next, and i abandoned my family partway through for the departmental reception to search for Jessie.  I hung out with Meredith, and Joan (whom i don't see enough), and saw Mary Barbara [Sherborn lady], and finally found Jessie.  Also Skarda -- who was giving out department pins for regalia, which apparently they've been getting rid of for at least 2 years.  I rather liked them, though i actually forgot to attach to my robe come Sunday.  After my family finished with SCMA, they went to Lyman and then found me.  They got a rather full Skarda experience.

Skarda suggested i write about massage in literature -- seedy and all.  I said it would be like my seminar paper -- fun to research but not so much to write.  She said she doesn't think of her massager as the brightest bulb.  And it's hard to get employ as the market is glutted -- but then, she pays one.

Skarda said only about 300 people (recent stat, probably from Atlantic Monthly) support themselves from their writing.  My father suspects this doesn't include, say, journalists.  He says i seem very comfortable with words -- very comfortable in front of a keyboard, using words.  So true.

Skarda told Joan's mom that she could always count on us to say smart things in Telling and Retelling.  Joan didn't remember speaking much at all in that class, and i'm inclined to agree (though i know i talked a lot) but whatever.  Reminded me a touch of Liz Carr's effusiveness, which was amusing.

Saw Prof. Kaminksy, who asked about my post-graduation plans.  I told him bartending and massage school.  "See, that's that look i was talking about."  No, actually, he was thinking about all that practice you have to do, and would i be local.  And he managed to not make it sound skeezy.  I mean, i know him, so i know it's not skeezy, but it's so the kind of thing that would have come out skeezy if i'd said it, so i was impressed.

We had dinner at Fresh Pasta, which was yum as usual.  And because our reservations were for 5pm we beat the dinner rush.

There was time to kill before Illumination Night, so i picked up my Zaleski final, since i'd been forgetting to that for days. Expandcut for professorial commentage )

When i was finally hungry again we went to Burdick and i got a $4 hot chocolate.  Not the sex-in-a-cup i was recalling from Winter Weekend, but still good.

Illumination was one of the few graduation exercises i was kind of excited about, and it disappointed.  The lanterns looked like balloons (pink, yellow, yellow-green, blue) though they were less bad when one was close-up (they had shrubbery designs on them) or when they were illuminated.  The Senior Candle Lighting was kinda lame -- we all got white candles and the class president lit them and then it was like "okay, yay you, you can go wander the illuminated paths now."  I was expecting some sort of procession -- since that seems to be a theme this weekend, and a procession of people holding candles would be cool.

Sunday was Pentecost.  I did the Scripture Reading (Acts 2:1-21 and 1 Corinthians 12:4-13) and was also asked to do the Call to Worship, which i willingly did, though i'm not sure how i feel about it.  ExpandRead it if you're interested. )  (Googling, it's apparently a poem by R.S. Thomas -- a 20th-century Welsh poet.)

Apparently Pentecost is considered the birth of the church, so they did confirmation this Sunday.  In... South America i think Tessa said it was... they pour flame colored rose petals over heads as symbolic of the flames of the Pentecost story, so she had the little kids do that to the confirmands.

Peter's sermon was called "In Our Own Native Language," and he talked about the confirmation class kids' statements of faith and how we each have our own frames of reference and things that are particularly important to us and so on, so when we talk about our faith it's like we have our own individual language, but people are still able to understand us, and it is due to the Holy Spirit that we are able to bridge some of the more difficult gaps.  I was a little confuzzled because my interpretation of the Acts account was that the disciples -- who were all from approximately the same linguistic region -- spoke and all those gathered (who came from a multitude of linguistic regions) heard their words in their own native tongues, not that the disciples all spoke in their own native tongues and everyone present was somehow able to understand them.

During her statement of faith, Isabelle used the phrase "war-torn," and i want people to understand why God sometimes demands -- or is interpreted as demanding -- violence or other things that we perceive as not good.  I had a moment of intense contra-left-ness and wished for God to be full of wrath and vengeance and pro-killing-people.  More sanely, i want people to realize that it is not true that the Bible fully supports what they value and that they're opponents are just wrong and misinterpreting; i want them to realize that it is complicated.  (Gee, look at how that is always my desire.)

Back when Peter first asked i wanted to be involved in a graduation service, my mom suggested that i ask for "Here I Am, Lord" to be included.  I didn't, since there wasn't really an opening to do so.  However.  What was the closing hymn?  "I Danced in the Morning"  I learned that i don't dislike the tune -- though it doesn't feel quite right -- and it's so not as obnoxious as it sounds when F. sings it ;)

I got so many congratulations after the service.  MJ gave me a card with a Starbucks gift card -- because i so frequently do tea duty and she comes over and chats with my while she drinks her coffee.

They were having a luncheon thing, so we went back to campus for brunch.  My brother said that people should just pay off portions of his student loans instead of giving him physical gifts.  (He's gonna graduate RPI with way more loans than i have from Smith).  I like that idea :)  (2 graduation cards arrived for me on Saturday -- both containing checks :) )

Like Ivy Day, Graduation seemed to require arriving 45 minutes early in large part for the photo ops.  I was rather indifferent.  I did actually get excited when we started to process, though, feeling all official and proud, and the happy face.  I saw a whole lot of people i knew on the sidelines and had a good view of the faculty procession.  It was a bit chilly, but i had jeans and other appropriate clothes on under my robe, so i didn't mind much.  And the college had thoughtfully provided us with bottled water underneath our seats.

There were a few drops of rain at the beginning of the procession, but otherwise it was completely fine.  And i actually liked both speeches -- Lauren Wolfe (to whose election as my class president [insert "She's not my president" joke here] my near immediate reaction was dread of Commencement) and Shelly Lazarus -- and approved of the honorary degrees.  Lazarus, class of 1968, talked about expectations and about what things were like when she graduated.  She said the question now isn't whether you can have at all but whether you want it all.  She talked about a Manhattan waitress who loves her job, saying, "Don't judge!" [Edit: link to full speech]

The whole thing only took about two hours.  A half hour of procession, a half hour of speeches, 45 minutes graduating us, plus about 10 minutes for the masters candidates, and then we were done.  Except for the Diploma Circle.  It sounds like a neat tradition in theory, but we had like the most ineffective diploma circle evar.  You're supposed to pass diplomas in concentric circles, passing the diplomas you've already seen into new circles, but we just ended up passing the same diplomas, and sometimes we had stacks of them and sometimes our hands were empty, so we finally just made one big circle -- which feels to me like how it should work anyway -- and i got mine relatively quickly at that point.  Immediately post-Graduation is an impossible time to see people, and i was impressed by the speed at which i connected with my family, but i was lucky enough to see Layna at the CC (where i used up my remaining OneCard money on more drinks). And hopefully now that we're residing in the same vicinity i'll get to see more of her.

Summation of the weekend: Having events structured as meaningful moments, like, "You're going to do this, and it's going to be meaningful for you," is weird. [Edit: Last week, Stacey said something about me being a control-freak and i said i didn't usually use that phrase, though i definitely use a number of similar phrases/adjectives for myself, but the phrase kept recurring in my head this weekend, since i know i really like to be able to control what i'm doing and i was realizing that that was probably the reason behind a lot of my ragifying moments this weekend. The fact that i didn't know in advance exactly how things were gonna function, trying unsuccessfully to find people, etc. -- all that is the kind of stuff that drives me up a wall.]

P.S. My brother says he's been pleasantly surprised by senior ceremonies (his and mine) and we had similar thoughts about what was good and what wasn't. He was a good sport about being dragged around all weekend, regardless.

I have Palmer orientation this Thursday.  In the mail on Monday i got my Student ID.  Look, i'm officially a student again :)  I really do need to get myself an actual job.  And, um, bugger.  I didn't actually coordinate the transportation before registering for a Palmer class, so i didn't think about the fact that i'm dependent upon two commuter rails plus a subway and 10pm is perilously close to when commuter rails stop running in Boston.  So yeah, don't actually have a way home.  Ditto Sunday service for the first day of my bartending class.  Why do i suck?  My mom can drive me in to class on Memorial Day morning, though, so that's not a big deal.  Any volunteers to drive me home from North or South Station in the vicinity of midnight every Tuesday night?  Floors to crash on also appreciated.

I also need to get myself a real job.  Having class at Salem at 6pm makes this whole office job thing difficult, though.  Grr.  See above re: thinking ahead and "I suck."



I read "Homestead" by inlovewithnight.  A good solid story that reads like an episode of the show [Firefly].  The voice reminds me of the show i love so much and brings tears to my eyes.

[livejournal.com profile] marauderthesn asked for suggestions of "gay movies that are watchable with parents."  I am so a bad person to ask.  I mean, i watched Claire of the Moon with my mom.  (Horrible movie, btw.)  My favorite moment, though, was watching Jeffrey and the phone ringing and hitting pause right on the "sex" frame.

[livejournal.com profile] penknife says: "Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe trailer: looks very pretty, but who knows about the acting and the script. Good or not, will clearly be next year's shiny new fandom. I fear the badfic."  All this Narnia movie talk is bringing out my seething loathing of adapting books into movies (Really need to write up that manifesto i do.) but the idea of more Narnia fic is appealing -- but then again, the fic i have loved has dealt with one of the things i hate about The Last Battle, and i don't tend to remember the minor characters in non-LWW books well enough to feel right reading fanfic about them, and i'm not sure how much good fanfic could be created with only the knowledge of LWW -- though White Witch backstory could be really interesting, either as post-MN for those who know it (which reminds me that i want more Illyria fic, also ancient!Dawn, and should check out History Lesson) or as AU for those writing only with knowledge of LWW, and the theology geek in me would be really interested in seeing any of the LWW characters post-LWW back in their own world.

I finally got a feedback on "Osiris Serenity" over on Blood Sings.  Brought tears to my eyes.  Interestingly, rereading the fic, i am less satisfied with it than i used to be.
hermionesviolin: (pensive)
Last meeting of Skarda's class was a house party per usual.  I kept feeling like there should be alcohol because last time i was there was the Christmas party at the end of Romantics class.  And then lo there was orange grapefruit compote with triple sec.  Which of course i didn't eat, 'cause hello grapefruit, but still.

On Monday i told Kate the Bluebeard story because she had never heard it (and it's my seminar reading for this week) and realized just how much i have totally adopted her gestures and inflections for storytelling.  Then i actually read the Perrault story, and found it so caricatured.  NMB actually finds the Grimms' "Fitcher's Bird" a more poorly put together story.

The last time i read Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" i was really into the heroine's sexual development, her awakening to the pleasures of S&M, and i was much less convinced this time around, which might mean that i was in a particular headspace last time and this time around am more aware of the fact that Carter didn't intend that (after all, the piano-tuner seems pretty vanilla) but given how much Carter uses the theme of awakening the dark primal bestial sexuality beneath the surface, and uses it as a positive thing, it seems to me a potentially valid reading of the text.  I want fanfic in which Bluebeard isn't a murderer and in which they negotiate a really hot kinky sexlife.  Alternatively, kinky post-canon fic.

Candi's doing her final paper on folklore motifs in Tori Amos songs, focusing on sex and violence.

It was sinking in on my way home from class that the class-taking phase of my undergraduate career is now over forever.

Poll inspired by a real-life story from a friend:
So, you're on a date with a guy.  Somehow it comes up in conversation that he would like to make a porn film, "But not the cheesy hardcore kind. Something classier - geared to women and couples."
[Poll #484240][And for those of whom your immediate reaction is, "I'm on a date with a guy? wtf?" just play along.]

And from a completely different context, [livejournal.com profile] phineasjones says, "i can't believe anyone out there is like, 'i have breasts, so i already have all the breast experience i need.' i mean, come on! there is so much variety to be explored!"

Fortune cookie: "Don't be hasty, prosperity will knock on your door soon."
If this soon-to-be-graduate believed on fortune cookies, this would be quite comforting.  (Though what's up with the implication that i'm being hasty?)  Extra fun if one adds on the requisite "in bed"  :)
And speaking of jobs for graduates, my father sent me this, which excerpts from a piece in The Christian Science Monitor that says the job market is improving for this year's college graduates.  ("The expected salary range for bachelor's degrees in liberal arts today: $29,400 to $35,000, according to CollegeJournal.com."  Hotness.)

House meeting re: house closing procedures didn't actually inform us of what to do if one actually has damaged furniture.  ecox asked how the college notifies/bills you, and Patricia didn't know.  I had thought there was a sheet we got at the end of the year whereon you can mark any damage in your room, but maybe i'm conflating that with the sheet you get when you first move in.

My Inklings paper is so much academic bullshit in the vein of my Eyre Affair paper.  In a novel which i whine about being full of stock characters, i ended up arguing for subtlty and complexity of characterization.  Huh.  I still need to do my reading journal, but that's even easier than the paper and can be turned in next week.  I am so excited to finally be able to work on my seminar paper in earnest.  I thought i had read nearly all the modern English language LRRH variants in existence, but i just read an article in a 1982 issue of International Folklore Review which contains the following paragraph: "It should be noted that these three obscene versions did not appear in pornographic magazines but were printed in The Smith, a perfectly serious American literary publication.  There are, of course, sexual illustrations of Little Red Riding Hood along this line in hard-core sex magazines which are unsuitable for reproduction here, but it cannot be denied that sexual interpretations of fairy stories in all degrees from refinement to crudity have become a popular form of entertainment among adults."  They do reproduce a 1974 Playboy cartoon and a 1978 Punch one, though.  And the footnote to that paragraph might get used in my paper (whose topic is LRRH as a willing sexual participant): "An advertisement for sexual stimulators showed a picture of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf with a variety of such devices and the caption 'The better to please you with, my dear.' Hustler, April 1978, 20."

I learned that Jane St. Clair wrote Voyager fic, including TNG crossover.  I, of course, refuse to read Voyager fic until i've watched all 7 seasons through.  I told Emma about the argument Cat and i had about TNG Q!sex given the Voyager canon, and she pointed out that if Q+human can have sex the Q way, shouldn't they also be able to the human way? ::hearts her::  I really need to rewatch that episode (preferably as part of a full canon tour, though).

Am considering hitting up the MFA Dance Concert on Friday and then leaving early to go to the One-Acts.  (The lack of Christopher Durang in the latter makes me sad.  But it's in the TV Studio rather than HF, which makes me think it's a different set of one-acts than usual.)

[livejournal.com profile] atpolittlebit points out a quote from "Life of the Party" (Angel 5.05) that could be seen to refer to Firefly.
hermionesviolin: black and white photo of Emma Watson as Hermione, with text "hermionesviolin" (hermione by oatmilk)
Oh skimming 400 pages.  At the beginning i kept getting sucked into reading the story and having to stop myself.  I read the trilogy for the first (and up until now) time the summer after the first movie came out (of course i still haven't seen the movies and probably never will) and during this half of the semester felt like i might appreciate it more reading it after this class, but it's bloody long.  And i was rather bored the first time and don't foresee my enjoyment increasing any considerable measure.  But it means so much to so many of my friends.  However, skimming Fellowship for my paper (I totally didn't read it for class earlier this semester when we were actually assigned it.) has confirmed for me that really i don't ever need to read it again.  Proof that i am a sap however, i cried at Expandspoiler? and no, it's not at all what you think it'll be, because my sappiness is so random sometimes )

I'm done taking notes and am off to sleep shortly.  This paper will so get done for Friday.  w00t.  (She said we could hand them in next week if we needed to, but i have a seminar paper and an exam, plus i have to do reading journal for this entire second half of the semester, so i really wanna get the paper done for the original deadline of this Friday.)  P.S. I'm sorry, but i totally channeled Ethan&Giles during the Saruman-of-Many-Colours scene.

ExpandThis, oddly, was the most striking -- to me -- of all the Gandalf bits i read. )

My seminar paper is only 15-20 pages?  Damn.  That's so much less imposing than the 20-30 page range i thought the assignment fell in.

I was the only person who wrote on The Eyre Affair.  Skarda read mine as a break from all the Mary Reilly papers and said something about it being a pleasure to read a well-written paper :)

Got the invoice for the Eng. Dept. t-shirts.  One of the screens was free?  Yay us.  (And they totally didn't charge us for the typesetting fee.)  These are gonna be like the cheapest shirts ever.  (Dunno if we'll get the same awesome deal for cheap shirts when they reorder in the fall, but as i won't actually be involved, i'm less than concerned.  Though i really do hope they do preorders.  I'm totally gonna be checking in ‘cause i'm a bitch like that.)  It makes me sad that the Classics Dept. changed their t-shirts from their old "More fun than an Atreid family reunion" slogan.

My flist exploded when the Serenity trailer came out.  [livejournal.com profile] wisdomeagle and i can spend the next 4 months being the only unspoiled Firefly fans.  Yay us.  (Elektra Barbie reminds me of Inara.)
hermionesviolin: (train)
Having to write a paper on Friday when i'm used to having Friday as an off day?  Totally messed up my conception of time.  I kept feeling like i should one more free day left.

I missed Biz and Cordelia preaching at HHHC Senior Sunday because i'd been asked to usher at First Churches.  My name was spelled correctly in the program, which was probably my biggest excitement about the whole thing.  Turned out it was Youth Sunday.  This kid Nick who looks about middle school age played "Gigue" from Sonata in D minor by Veracini, and he's not a prodigy, but he was really good -- certainly better than i ever was, though that's not saying a whole lot.  This girl Chelsea who's a freshman at NorthamptonHigh (to write NHS would just be too weird for me) did the sermon, and you could tell she was nervous 'cause she was talking fast and stumbling over what she was saying sometimes, but she was pretty good.  And Sasha not only did a handdrums piece but he also did a piece he wrote himself with guitar, singing (though i couldn't make out a lot of the words), and harmonica, that last of which means he wins at life.

Kelly got installed at Chicopee at 2pm, but obviusly i couldn't go.  I meant to ask Liza for her e-mail address.

I finished a whole set of website edits (which won't go live until Sunday) and as well as my MAT project.  (Why am i not motovated until it's like T minus 24 hours to deadline?)  It's a very traditional unit with reading quizzes and an exam including passage identification and all that, and i feel like i got lazy, but i'm a kind of an off-the-cuff type of girl, so my discussion outlines are only going to be so comprehensive.  And i'm honestly torn between feeling like i don't cover enough and feeling like i try to cover too much, since i'm still in Smith College English major mode rather than high school English class mode.  I think it's a reasonably comprehensive (for high school) unit though, and also flexible.

I didn't reread Charles Williams for Inklings class 'cause of sleep dep (the first time i did the reading i was sleep deprived and retained little, so i figured repeating that wouldn't help anything) but it turned out okay because she broke us up into groups in class and my group (highonsleepdepZia, SullenEmily, and some other girl) got the one about the Inklings phenomenon, which CZ hadn't intended initially, but when she realized it was us she made some crack about how we'd be good at it or know a lot or be argumentative or something. Anyway i remember thinking "Way to go having a rep," 'cause it's so true.

I think i might finally be under enough deadline pressure to actually make myself do all this work.

I went to the second batch of Eng. Dept. thesis presentations.  Turns out i actually know the Auden girl insomuch as i've had classes with her.  Was weird listening to the Space Trilogy presentation 'cause hello something i've acatually read (2/3 of).  And i had forgotten how brilliant J is.  And to my surprise, i found myself actually wanting to read her book.

In Renaissance Drama, Emma's reading John Ford's " 'Tis Pity She's a Whore" and told me i need to read it.  In fact i already have, so all is right with the world.  I read Angela Carter's retelling first, and frequently blame it for my incest kink.
I boggle that i'm the one of all my friends (by which i mean: the cohort i surround myself with here at Smith) who is nigh on unsquickable, has no TMI threshhold, etc.  Emma expressed surprise that i think of this as some sort of new development.  I think partly i still think of myself as being around people like Mimi and Allison.  And more generally being around people who are so much more sexually experienced (and interested in being sexually experienced) than i.  And the internalization of people's perceptions of me (the first time Mimi heard me swear -- back in high school -- she literally stopped in her tracks and made me repeat it because she couldn't believe it had come out of my mouth).




[livejournal.com profile] club_joss: book club-esque discussion of fanfiction.  Looks interesting.  It just started, and the current fic is a Spike/Xander, so i'm abstaining for now but am friending it to keep an eye on it.  (Speaking of which, i really should catch up on [livejournal.com profile] ats_nolimits at some point.)

I also added [livejournal.com profile] su_herald and [livejournal.com profile] meta_fandom to my flist, which i probably should have done a while ago (though there is the whole distraction=bad factor).  This is a really interesting personal essay on the power dynamics involved in rl sex, seguing into a discussion about writing chan, and then seguing back to rl.

Serenity trailer comes out on Tuesday, probably before the Hitchhiker movie.  I was so willing to go see Elektra over break to see the trailer, but i am not seeing HGttG and not going to the movies the last week of classes, and being spoiler-free is how i prefer to operate anyhow.  (Yes i know September 30 is a long way away.  But y'all are good at cut-tagging.)

From the zinesters list:
Are you still saddened by the demise of the teen magazine Sassy?? Do you have trouble understanding what all the hubbub about Sassy was about?? Have you ever ranted or raved about Sassy in a zine??

Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer are currently working on a book about Sassy, to be published by Simon, Farrar & Giroux, and are looking for articles about Sassy (positive, negative, whatever).

If you have printed, written, or read any such articles about Sassy in a zine (even if the focus of the piece is not Sassy itself), please contact Rebecca at rebecca.willa.davis@gmail.com.
I think i left some of my posters at home, ‘cause going through the ones i have here i know i own some other ones.  These are the ones i have in my room currently (that are free for the claiming):
One thing i will never live down is not shaking my class president's hand after getting my high school diploma.  I wasn't purposely snubbing him (i was indifferent to him) it was just that the way stuff was set up, he wasn't directly in my line of vision and i honestly forgot.  Some of the football players were on the periphery of my circles in high school (and then went to UMass Amherst, though i have yet to bump into them), so when they end up in the local paper my father saves them for me, but i had completely forgotten about the existence of this kid until my father e-mailed me the following:
"LB Alfred Fincher of UConn was taken by the Saints in the third round of the NFL Draft [...]  Fincher was the first player ever taken by the Saints out of Connecticut" -from the New Orleans Saints website
and more info from the NFL site
My high school class president will be playing for the NFL next year.  I'm feeling a little weird about my future right now.

So speaking of weird, i heart the Hitchhiker's Guide (book quotes, no movie) icons here.  And there are some good ones here.

Also: [livejournal.com profile] son_of_art on [livejournal.com profile] akronohten (in a thread here):
your own live journal would lead anyone to believe that you were "Bi", which is (as most people know) a term used by gay men who are still partly in denial. At best, it is the socially "light" label referring to people who still amount to part-time Sodomites.
I think "part-time Sodomite" is the best redonculous phrase i've heard recently.  I may need to adopt it.

So yeah, that deadline pressure i spoke of above.  ::runs away::  More link spam tomorrow.
hermionesviolin: an image of Alyson Hannigan (who plays Willow Rosenberg) with animated text "you think you know / what you are / what's to come / you haven't even / BEGUN" (Default)
Parental love for the day: Thank you for not needing to be given a copy of the "I am the Parent of a College Senior" Riot Act.

Oh, feeling so t-shirt-ed out.  Protestant!Carolyn and i both got sucked into buying "God Squad" t-shirts from Newman ($5 to Box 7549).  And okay, so i am mildly discomfited, but the discomfort at having a t-shirt that says "God Squad" is won over by the multi-level coolness of having a t-shirt that says "God Squad."  It says "Les Femmes Catholiques" in pretty script underneath, but the type of script means it isn't immediately legible.

Size Matters is getting "A waist is a terrible thing to mind" t-shirts, which people should buy 'cause we have to have more than just us ordering for it to be a reasonable price.

And y'all have convinced me of the lowercase "word" for the English Department t-shirts.

Laughing Wild starring Christopher Durang at Huntington Theatre?  [livejournal.com profile] ahlksey wins at life for informing me of this.  It runs June 3-26 at Virginia Wimberly Theatre at the Calderwood Pavilion.  [539 Tremont]  Tickets are $42, except "Last Row Orchestra" are only $14.  I am not paying $42, but $14 is totally cool.  And with only 360 people, i figure the seats can't suck that much.
Googling the director, i learned that there is an Internet Broadway Database.  ::heart::  (Okay, so it's not particularly relevant to me, being as i am not so much a theatre-goer, but it pleases me that such a thing exists.)

I got mad in Inklings class today.  CZ was talking about George McDonald and how his writing isn't all that great though the mythic stories themselve are arguably compelling, and she talked about Lewis' literary criticism and how he basically said you should forgive the hackneyed language because myth is a different entity than literature -- and admittedly it's problematic that i haven't read any of what Lewis had to say about literary criticism nevermind the specifics of what he said about McDonald, so we didn't exactly have the same frame of reference, but i was irked, because retelling a powerful myth in a shoddy manner makes on a bad storyteller, and you shouldn't hide behind the myth or excuse bad writing by saying the powerful story shines through the bad storytelling, and maybe that isn't exactly what he was saying, but i had definitely forgotten what it felt like to get mad in that class as i've been so nonparticipatory recently (since i mostly haven't been doing the reading).

And in doing my Beauty and the Beast readings for seminar, i found stuff i wanted to work into my Little Red Riding Hood paper (women, beasts, sex... we are hardly surprised).

Pope roundup via InstaPundit.  I read it quickly and have read few of the links (yet).  This is a useful bullet list about him, though.  And one thing it says is that he has said is that priestly celibacy is "Not a dogma of the faith" -- though obviously a lot of the other things he's said are problematic.  Expandmore Pope talk )

After deep talk, i give you fic: Kyrie Eleison by Kyra Cullinan (Angel-centric) and Simple Things (the “Judged By Its Cover” remix) by Kurukami (Book-centric).

And for lightness: springy Jossverse icons and bright shiny Firefly ones.

Selections from my Random playlist: "Little Musgrave" by John Wesley Harding, "Toy Soldiers" by Martika, "welcome to" by Ani DiFranco, "One of These Days" by Michelle Branch, "Ice Cream" by Sarah McLachlan, "Waltzing With Him" by Christine Lavin, "Blood From a Stone" by Jonatha Brooke, "Spending My Time" by Roxette, "Deliver Me" by Sarah Brightman, "Innocence Maintained" by Jewel, "Wonderland" by Collapsis

(Avoiding my homework?  Me?)
hermionesviolin: (train)
Homework is getting done (though i do need to stop letting myself get distracted), and SCMA hasn't killed me ded yet. I got a plotbunny for the Ethan ficathon, and the deadline got moved up.

CZ on my reading journal: "Thanks for letting me eavesdrop on your journal. Thoughtful + discerning. You could play Anscombe to Lewis!"

selections from CZ's comment on my midterm paper: "This is a very discerning essay on an issue central to Perelandra (and also, of course, to Paradise Lost). [...] An insightful discussion of Lewis's portrayal of obedience, with its subtle gradations. Your analysis of the reasons why there must be an arbitrary divine command (over and above the rational moral law) is compelling. The writing is lucid. All in all, a great paper!"

MAT prof on my midterm: "I am so delighted that you decided to take the class. Although it is clear from your writing and comments in class that a scholar's life awaits you, I hope that our review of some seminal works in the high school curriculum, as well as recent writings on pedagogy, will hold you in good stead when you work in the academy. I also hope that the midterm exercise proved helpful in alerting you to the difficulties of framing questions for high school students. If you have some time, let's get together and have a more detailed discussion of your work."

I'm Room Draw proxying tomorrow (Tuesday) night. People are already moving on to class selection. Weird to not be partaking of that (and jealous to not be taking mt's Hell course) though i'll be doing course selection again anyhow -- either at UPenn or in Boston. (No, i haven't heard from UPenn yet. Yes i'm calling them on Friday if i haven't heard by then.)

Am telling myself i don't need to attend any of the Women Practicing Buddhism workshops, especially as my Saturday is already rather booked.
12:30-2:30, Wright Auditorium: Tristan Taormino: "Confessions of a Sex-Crazed Mind"
3:00-6:15, Neilson Browsing Room: symposium for Donfried's retirment

ExpandI'm so cute. )

Oh, and Happy Birthday [livejournal.com profile] lilithchilde. Hope you have an awesome time with [livejournal.com profile] ladyvivien.
hermionesviolin: image of Lindsey McDonald (as played by Christian Kane) looking angrily toward the viewer, with text "I'm having some evil hand issues" (evil hand)
CZ's lecture on Chesterton did not improve my feelings on him. Especially since she talked about the Inklings as a continuation of Romanticism. Yeah, way to not sell me on something. She did say that Chesterton was often best friends with his enemies, in a way that reminded me of I was reminded of Tammy Bruce talking about Dr. Laura, so that was heartful. I sat quietly through the lecture and then bitched quickly at the end and stayed after briefly. She basically admitted that his analogies are overstated and his arguments don't hold up to close scrutiny. And yet, somehow this isn't a problem. 'Cause he's not actually wrong. Or something. Oh please let Mere Christianity be better.

Lunch was grilled cheese, though, so that was happifying.

Work followed. Oh Tryon Trip, how you are the bane of everybody's existence. Participant lists make my eyes bleed.

Pride and Prejudice in tonight's MAT class. Marina did the presentation, which surprised me. (Oh me and my tendency to project.) I totally didn't even take the time to refresh myself on the book but managed to contribute to class discussion anyhow. I think i might kill myself if i had to teach that book, though. (Yes, i know, i shouldn't joke about that. Speaking of, really should call SheOfTheManyUserNames.) We watched the dance scene wherein we first meet Darcy (actually starting with the preceding scene wherein Mrs. B. frets about convincing Mr. B. to visit Bingley) in 3 film versions (BBC, A&E, Laurence Olivier) and i was struck by how identical some of the actors/actresses were across versions. The dance was quite different in each one, though, and of course each version kept in slightly different things.

On The Commonly Confused Words Test, i scored:
English Genius
You scored 100% Beginner, 93% Intermediate, 100% Advanced, and 77% Expert!
You did so extremely well, even I can't find a word to describe your excellence! You have the uncommon intelligence necessary to understand things that most people don't. You have an extensive vocabulary, and you're not afraid to use it properly! Way to go!
I have no idea what those percentages mean (and it would be nice if they told you the correct answers at the end) but yay being a genius.

Who thinks Kate ([livejournal.com profile] diadeloro) is cut out to be a soccer mom? Has somebody been spiking the water or something? Babe, just wear the pearls and start handing out death warrants. I totally volunteer to hit people with large sticks.

I updated my site. (And on the page it suddenly looks like a big update. I'm kind of impressed.)
Dear vidders: Please include title and artist of the song used as well as your own personal contact information in each vid.
Dear midnight-tempest.com: Why are you dead?

People sent me nice response e-mails about the feedback i sent. Yay for being appreciated. And yay for making people's days.

I am refraining from commenting on the "storm" until the morn. I will say that i don't particularly want a snowday, though.
hermionesviolin: photoshoot image of Michelle Trachtenberg (who plays Dawn in the tv show Buffy) looking seriously (angrily?) at the viewer, with bookshelves in the background (angry - books)
I was going to read all of G. K. Chesteron's Orthodoxy even though we were only asked to read the first 4 chapters. However, i am not a fan and am muchly disinclined to read the rest. (Even though the titles imply that some of the other chapters talk more explicitly about Christianity, which is a big selling point -- especially since Chesterton barely touched on Christianity in the first 4 chapters.) I didn't disagree with everything he said, but i disagreed with a lot, and his tone frequently rubbed me the wrong way, and his arguments often seemed flawed.

In other news, i reread The Polar Express. My Santa issues mean i enjoy it less than most. And as predicted, i do prefer my remembered (more accurately, "imagined," i suppose) ending. But not for the reason i had originally expected. Expandspoilers )
hermionesviolin: black and white photo of Emma Watson as Hermione, with text "hermionesviolin" (hermione by oatmilk)
Remember how i said i was distressed that we were cutting down on the Mere Christianity reading to read That Hideous Strength and e-mailed the prof. I got the following as a reply:
Thanks very much for your thoughts, Elizabeth - I've been mulling this over, too, and thinking along much the same lines -

My latest thinking is that we should drop THS and bring in some other material to reveal more of the range and subtlety of Lewis and his circle. We will read parts of Mere Christianity; but not by itself. Though it's Lewis's most influential work of apologetics, MC will strike some readers as infected with a patronizing folksiness (probably comes from the fact that these were wartime radio talks). I'm rethinking all this, and greatly appreciate your input — and I also very much appreciate your articulate and discerning contributions to our discussions!
I win!

Expandmore )

Also: I was intelligent in Skarda's class and she was critical of my reader response paper but i didn't completely disgrace myself.

We had escargot for dinner. What's up with that? They were really pretty, and garlic&olive oil sounds yum, but i wasn't gonna break my vegetarianism just to try. The kitchen staff kept encouraging us to try some, which almost no one did, but the staff was certainly pleased with them. Personally, i helped myself to lots o' mashed potatoes. One of the staff jokingly said, "Why don't you just take the whole tray?"

Isn't the Rally Day show usually the night of Rally Day itself? Le sigh. And why are the MCs always shoddy? I even like Candi and Joan. The skits were lame; never have i been happier to see The Distractions. (Though the junior skit followed them and honestly, i quite liked the two juniors just sitting and talking.) They totally got the biggest applause of the night. And the lights were dimmed so it was like a real rock concert. By the middle of the second song i think, people were dancing in the aisles and then converging on the stage. Alex said, "You are the best audience ever," and, "Normally we're The Distractions, but tonight we seem to be live bait." Their set of three songs was basically a wall of sound in which i could barely discern any of the words, though they did "Sweet Jane" as an encore. Despite the fact that their music isn't my thing (and that Alex Keller really rubbed me the wrong way) i do so enjoy them.
Filled with clever wordplay, literary allusion, and bibliowit, The Eyre Affair combines elements of Monty Python, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But its quirky charm is all its own.
-The Wall Street Journal [blurb on the cover of my paperback]
The book is not unenjoyable, but the praise is rather overstated. I do have love for intertextuality and the power of stories and audience interaction and so on, though. Chapter 18? I am in love. And the story grows as it goes along. Also: Expandspoilerish passage ) I demand crossover fic, now. (Especially because of Chapter 17.)

Expandgratuitous internetage )

Mmm, snow.

Feb. 22nd, 2005 10:08 am
hermionesviolin: (anime night)
[written before bed last night while the internet was dead]

Waking up to a world lightly blanketed in white... yeah, i'm easy to please.

"Snow in the night is like a gift." -Kathy quoting Skarda

"The best way to get through winter is to enjoy it. The snow will stop soon and a wonderland will remain." -Skarda's e-mail to ENG 205

Why does Smith declare a snow emergency every time it snows? Their e-mail says 6-8 inches is predicted. It has been the snow equivalent of misting all day with a total accumulation of maybe 2 inches.

Talking about Perelandra in class was like pulling teeth. I actually really liked the book, but since i didn't have any serious issues with it (interminable description as in the last book, and a section near the end on essential masculinity and femininity that i well could have done without) i hadn't posted anything on Blackboard, and since we only had the weekend to read the book i suspected a lot of people hadn't read/finished it. I ended up talking a lot in class, mostly explaining why i thought Lewis' arguments were effective.
Talking about hierarchy (which is clearly important to Lewis), one student said that if you know your place, then you know what to focus on doing/being responsible for (because you know what stuff other people are responsible for) which i thought was interesting, and which connects to the idea about the importance of the present, which is a big thing in Perelandra -- of being satisfied with what one has, not worrying about the past or the future, not trying to recapture joys but just being happy in the joy of the present moment.

Then during lunch Emma and i were dorking out about Narnia. (Is Aslan's breathing on all the statues outside the White Witch's palace akin to the Harrowing of Hell?) Much though i talk about wanting just the Text of what Lewis actually believed, it is interesting to tease the Biblical allusions and theological/philosophical beliefs out of his fictional works.

Our most recently revised syllabus has us taking a break to do G. K. Chesterton [chapters 1-4 of Orthodoxy, plus some sayings] next week (since he was such a big influence on Lewis) and then doing books 1 and 2 of Mere Christianity the following week and then That Hideous Strength the following week -- starting Tolkien after Spring Break (which, it occurs to me, means one can start Fellowship over Spring Break; possibly CZ's one moment of good planning for this course). I e-mailed CZ suggesting we read all of MC and skip THS -- esp. since no one's gonna read/finish THS anyway.

I also came home to part of Spike's Woodstock diatribe from "School Hard" on my newly cleaned white board and cracked up laughing. (Kate had apparently been waiting "months" for my white board to be clean so she could write it.)

And the best piece of the day was the return of someone i have missed very much.

I'm still working on this whole getting-up-at-9am thing, but i did manage to have some breakfast this morning -- and whether it's 'cause i've been conscientous about consuming iron or just what, but i've been feeling really good -- which is so welcome after the angry foul mood i spent much of last week in.

My hair has been bothering me, though. I'm considering getting it cut quite short.

In MAT class, the student presentation on the Berger essay had us looking at a variety of images and thinking about a variety of questions. Looking at an L.L. Bean ad, Marina described it as, "a handsome middle-aged man who's comfortable with his life and his decision to buy the red turtleneck."

After i came home, Emma and and Kate and i watched the first 3 episodes of Blackadder II. I had forgotten that the season starts with "Bells," which is my favorite episode of the whole series (though grr, FlashHeart).

While waiting for the living room to be vacated so we could watch, we chatted, including about movies. Kate says i am musical deprived. I maintain that i've seen a whole lot of musicals, and even quite liked many of them; just most of them date from after 1990. Thinking about it later, here's my list.

I loved:
Les Miserables
Into the Woods
Little Shop of Horrors (the play, not the movie)
Singin' in the Rain
1776
the Rogers and Hammerstein Cinderella w/ Brandy et al (i've never seen the original)
Jesus Has Two Mommies
Once More, With Feeling (the Buffy musical episode)
Godspell (the play moreso than the movie)

I have also seen:
West Side Story
Grease
The Sound of Music
HMS Pinafore
The Mikado
Pirates of Penzance
Damn Yankees
The Wizard of Oz
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
RENT
On The Town
Jesus Christ Superstar
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
hermionesviolin: animated icon of a book open on a desk, with text magically appearing on it, with text "tell me a story" framing it (tell me a story [lizzieb])
It's possible that my time would be better spent copying down interesting passages from stuff i've read recently for my own future reference since all of like 5 people comment on my LJ, but hey, the journal's really for me first and foremost -- though obviously not entirely since this does get edited with the awareness of audience and all that.

ExpandWednesday-Saturday )

[livejournal.com profile] lasultrix says, "There's no such language as Irish Gaelic. There's a language called Scots Gaelic, but the branch of the Gaelic languages spoken in Ireland is just called Irish."
hermionesviolin: (moon house)
Carol Zaleski mentioned that she much prefers Lewis’ fiction to his non-fiction. I, of course, am the opposite. While it’s fascinating to tease theology and philosophy out of his fiction, i want to engage straight-on with what he really believes. In her meta commentary on the Angel S5 DVD commentary, [livejournal.com profile] wisdomeagle mentions the idea of One True Text, and we all know that i am so Truth Girl, and i found myself thinking about how stuff like Narnia and the space trilogy are just other ways of expressing the meaning of the Biblical story, and maybe i’m just boring and not imaginative enough, but if i had to pick between the two, i would rather hear what Lewis actually thinks the Bible means.

I suspect it would have been better for us to read Mere Christianity before the space trilogy, but not having read it i can’t say, and i do think it is preferable to read the trilogy all at once rather than breaking it up. We discussed in class on Friday not only whether to move on to Perelandra or to read Mere Christianity next but also whether to read the whole (220 pages) of Perelandra over the weekend or to just read the first half. I understand that one can in fact discuss a partial story, but it seems to me that one loses so much not having the full thing. It was bad enough reading just LWW and having people ask questions that we answered using the rest of the Narnia books. In Out of the Silent Planet it takes a while to get to the social philosophy, and one doesn’t reach the allegorical theology until almost the end, so i was very interested to move on and get the rest of it. As it turned out, in Perelandra almost all the philosophy is in the first half -- though yet again, Lewis’ interminable description of the planetary topology drove me up a wall. Most of the book was really interesting, though -- philosophy and interesting commentary on the Christian understanding of the universe.

When the Incarnation is being explained, i nearly wept. Partly i think it’s just that i’ve been on edge recently, but i like to think that it’s also that that story is so damn powerful - and Lewis does some really interesting stuff with the traditional Christian narrative in this book. And then when the Temptation begins it is so depressing, because we all know the First Story, and this time it’s different, but it’s still depressing to see it start, and continue. Lewis escapes the trap that so many authors fall into of making the Bad Guy appealing. One understands and is sympathetic to his arguments, and they hold far more weight in our own world where the existence of God isn’t a given as it is in the world of Ransom and the Lady, but
He had full opportunity to learn the falsity of the maxim that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. Again and again he felt that a suave and subtle Mephistopheles with red cloak and rapier and a feather in his cap, or even a sombre tragic Satan out of Paradise Lost, would have been a welcome release from the thing he was actually doomed to watch. [...] It showed plenty of subtlety and intelligence when talking to the Lady; but Ransom soon perceived that it regarded intelligence simply and solely as a weapon, which it had no more wish to employ in its off-duty hours than a soldier has to do bayonet practice when he is on leave. Thought was for it a device necessary to certain ends, but thought itself did not interest it. It assumed reason as externally and inorganically as it had assumed Weston’s body. (page 128, my edition)
The final book in the trilogy nears 400 pages, and i’m really rather happy to end the story with Perelandra. (And yet, the revised syllabus does in fact have us spending a week on That Hideous Strength. Le sigh.)
hermionesviolin: (anime night)
Friday it warmed up and melted the snow from the previous night. Saturday night, Sunday really as it was after midnight, we had a little snow -- nice coating on the cars and suchlike. There was still a little bit left when i left for church, but it was already feeling springlike, and all was melted by the time i came back. It feels far too early to have the winter/spring back-and-forth. Emma has a nice poetic entry loving the snow. The snow still makes me happy, and i'm glad i'm not the only one.



Prelude Meditation
Lead us not, then, into temptation of playing God with anyone; of judging people as though we had God’s right to judge them; of playing games with people as though they existed for the purpose of giving us pleasure and satisfaction.
-Bishop John B. Coburn, Deliver Us From Evil

Call to Worship
This is the season of Lent, a season to remember the sufferings of Jesus Christ.
A season to remember that to follow Christ is to take up out cross and be a servant to others.
A season to remember Jesus' question: "Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?"
A season to ask ourselves how we, like Simon the Cyrene, might help to bear The Cross.
A season to ask ourselves how we, like Pilate and Caiphas and the crowd, continue to nail Christ to the Cross.
A season to ask ourselves what we, like the woman with the fine ointment, have to offer.
A season to watch and wait with Christ; that we may have the courage in our own hour of testing.
A season to proclaim with Mary Magdalene, that Christ is not dead but alive!
I like church a lot better when we don't talk about the President of the United States as being evil.

First Churches is doing something of an inverse Advent, though -- extinguishing one light from a candelabra each Sunday through Lent (three purple candles on each side of one taller white candle).



Why did i volunteer to present on Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"? I'd forgotten how tough that story is. I love and adore Joe and owe him my firstborn or something -- well okay not really, since it's only pretend teaching.

Having finished Jane Eyre obscenely late last night, i struggled through Out of the Silent Planet today (Sunday).

Of the trilogy, my father wrote: "The speculation on what other planets are like turns out to be very wrong, which shouldn't get in the way of someone nurtured on Buffy, but which did bother a younger science geek (guilty as charged, your honor)."

I argued that you have to play by the rules of your universe, so setting a story in this universe and getting things wrong would bother me. Once they landed i was full willing to have described for me whatever kind of world Lewis fancied, but the bizareness of the journey bothered me (not to mention the incessant descriptions, but that's a complaint of a different nature).

[Oh, dork moment: a scene in Out of the Silent Planet reminded me of The Lord of the Rings because i'd recently watched a fanvid.]

Monday Inklings class is cancelled due to professor illness, necessitating Friday class. Grr. I have a paper due Friday, which i would rather work on Friday than on Monday. Yeah, yeah, life is pain.



I buy way more alcohol for underage first years other people than i do for myself. Grey Goose has really nice packaging (and a time-sensitive splash page! though the website has no further content).

I need to scan the outside cover of the Loves Me Not package box 'cause it rawks. And the voodoo doll is cool. And the eraser says ERASE in neat lettering withe the latter letters partially erased and the soap says PURIFY with bubbles around the word and the chocolate wrapper says BINGE with a bite mark. (shoddy image of the package from their website)

The quote on the inside of the Loves Me package lid worries me:

Submit to love without thinking,
      as the sun rose this morning recklessly
extinguishing our star-candle minds.
     -Rumi

(Searching for the full quote online, i found an interesting Unitarian sermon entitled "The Long Work of Rising." [PDF, HTML])

Though really, they're both kinda weird. The Loves Me Not is:

      I fled. O witches, O misery, O hate.
My treasure was left in your care...
      I have withered within me all human hope.
With the silent leap of a sullen beast,
      I have downed and strangled every joy.
-Arthur Rimbaud

The piece this is excerpted from is called A Season in Hell. Googling also got me a BtVS mid-S5 fanfic that uses the passage as an epigraph :).



Bringing Up Baby [two-disc special edition] and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead are both soon to be released on DVD.
hermionesviolin: (train)
Why did it take me so long to go visit the Michaelson Gallery? Note to self: visit often

"You're too practical" -Felicia, to me, at lunch. She continued to say that i should be more fluffy, by which apparently she means whimsical. Somehow not something i ever aspired to. Meg says i'm whimsical, which coming from her i don't take as an insult. This became a theme, recounted at dinner, and Anna said, "The idea of you being fluffy scares me."

I also talked about my Inklings class and C. S. Lewis and Surprised by Joy and my fury at the ending and in my recounting some of my initial fury came across and Emma said that was the first time she had ever seen me really angry. This seemed so odd to me, but then of course i realized that i tend not to get angry at my friends, so they're unlikely to see me angry. Allie and i have had heated discussions (often via LJ/AIM) but i'm not sure i've ever gotten really furious, either in print or in person. Hmm.

Kate and Laura introduced me and Cat to Foamy. Foamy's Rant II reminds me so much of my younger brother. (I e-mailed said brother and he replied: "that site is awesome, especially the rants.") I agree with Kate that the Amityville toaster was definitely the best of the ones we saw.

[And if you need more procrastination: Super Bowl ads]

Cat and i went upstairs to Felicia and Hilary's room and were cryptic and Felicia asked what we were up to and Cat said "sex" because that's her answer to everything (well that and potatoes) and then realized what she had said (and Cat is SO straight) and we started dying of laughter.

Ash Wednesday is tomorrow. When did that happen? I think part of my problem is that the weather has been so gorgeous that it doesn't feel like that 'long dark teatime of the soul' period i associate with Lent. Should i give up angsting about people liking me for Lent?

My BtVS-verse femslash ficathon assignment worries me.

I'm still deciding how i feel about Stacey's new haircut.

via [livejournal.com profile] scrollgirl (via [livejournal.com profile] tzikeh): gaypants icons and the following quote

All American writing gives me the impression that Americans don't care for girls at all. What the American male really wants is two things: he wants to be blown by a stranger while reading a newspaper and he wants to be fucked by his buddy when he's drunk. Everything else is society.
-W. H. Auden, in The Table-Talk of W. H. Auden

P.S. Meg called me "hella cool" and "more than a little bit brilliant"
*dies*

And edit the second: #9 here is so cute. (And having read the book, i enjoy the Stardust icons.)
hermionesviolin: (train)
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 [livejournal.com profile] 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 [livejournal.com profile] 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:


[livejournal.com profile] ats_nolimits 6.10: Girls' Night Out by [livejournal.com profile] ladycat777 and [livejournal.com profile] 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 [livejournal.com profile] amproof wants a rec of your favorite fic of your own.

Eowyn and Theoden vid to Tori Amos' "Winter" by [livejournal.com profile] wolfling and [livejournal.com profile] 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.

[livejournal.com profile] doyle_sb4 is an evil enabler. *looks at [livejournal.com profile] stagesoflove and [livejournal.com profile] 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).
hermionesviolin: (train)
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 [livejournal.com profile] 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 [livejournal.com profile] 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'.
[livejournal.com profile] 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:

ExpandUm, what? )
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 [livejournal.com profile] pardalis05 in [livejournal.com profile] 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/
ExpandCat made me do this. My result is lame, though. )
hermionesviolin: black and white photo of Emma Watson as Hermione, with text "hermionesviolin" (hermione by oatmilk)
Pats won the AFC. (Wow, "the New England Patriots gunning for their third title in four years and the Philadelphia Eagles looking for their first.")

$2.79? When did Media Mail shipping get so expensive? However, difficult to argue with 75-cent books. And of course i had efollet open in an adjoining tab to check when stuff would be just as cheap at the bookstore once one factors in shipping.

$105.62 for 20 texts on half.com (and of course slightly over half of that was for shipping, but still much cheaper than it would have been at the bookstore).

Was so nice to just lie in bed knowing i didn't have to get up. So of course by the time i did get up and shower, there were a bajillion people in line in the bookstore so i moved my book-purchasing trip to Tuesday afternoon. See, this is why having late-morning classes is a bad idea for me. I don't ever get up in the morning, thus wasting a good chunk of my day.

AJ came back on Friday. The previous day, i told Alona i was sure there was stuff i had done wrong or neglected to do over the past near 2 weeks of AJ's vacation, and she said, "But the world didn't end, now did it?" which was comforting. By the time i left at the end of the work day today, i think AJ was still working through the backlog, but she has yet to find anything to be upset with me about (at least enough to tell me so) so that's good.

I read most of Part 1 of The Inklings at work during the downtimes. In the interest of ever getting to bed, i'll spare you the quotage. It talks a lot about W. T. Kirkpatrick's influence on C. S. Lewis being "ruthlessly logical" which of course won me muchly. It also talks a lot about story/myth and the power thereof and i was reminded of Kelly, when i told her about my Buffy paper, saying that my kind of work was gonna save the church -- making the stories relevant and interesting to young people.

We watched part of a video on Tolkien (narrated in part by Dame Judi Dench) and his son talked about Tolkien's distate for modern machines, which being my father's daughter immediately put me on edge with its talk of coercion and tyrrany, but then he talked about the LotR books and how magic and the machine are so close and how the ring had to be destroyed because if Gandalf had the ring it would be worse than if Sauron had the ring because Gandalf would be righteous, would be self-righteous, and would coerce the world to good ends, and that that's what his father feared. Given my distaste for people's tendency to insist that the end doesn't justify the means except when it's their end of choice only without actually admitting that, i was so very very pleased.

Oh, and the professor talked some about Charles Williams' interest in magic and the occult while being a devout Anglican and i got thinking about Willow and kabbalah and now very much wanna read Williams.

I'm still a bit unsure about the class, but i'm sticking with it, sure that i can make it be a valuable experience for me.
Aim of the course: Collaborative study of the Inklings, a group of scholars and friends centered in Oxford during the decades surrounding World War II, whose works of fantasy, mythology, philology, and theology have had a far-reaching influence on recent religious thought.

Our major focus will be on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, but we will also give some consideration to Charles Williams and Owen Barfield.

[...]

Here are some of the topics and themes we'll encounter:
Representations of good and evil, moral struggle and sacrifice, fate and free will, sin and redemption, despair and hope, friendship and loss
Rediscovery of myth (and Christianity as the "true myth"); nostalgia for things medieval and archaic; the magic of words; imagination in the service of reason
Technological power: "the machine." How the Inklings responded to the challenges posed by war, environmental degradation, and social change
New voices of tradition: popular apologetics and the "romance of orthodoxy"
My MAT class consists of 2 Smith MATs (undergrad: Bowdoin and Bryn Mawr), 2 Smith juniors, a UMass senior, and me. [livejournal.com profile] feminist_poet, i think the prof teaches high school in your town.

I'm feeling just a touch terrified, but an hour into the class and already i had that desire to teach high school English, to instill that passion for literature in kids. Oh i've been there before, and after a few days i remember that i'm so not cut out to teach high school, but the class will be really valuable anyway. And hey, i've grown. Maybe i really could do high school. Maybe if i don't get into any PhD programs, i'll go for a MAT and go back to doing Buffy in my spare time. Dunno. Alternative plans are good to have.
English 490 is a class designed for students who are considering careers as high school English teachers. We will read and discuss texts that are commonly included in high school curricula in Ameria, and will consider strategies for teaching those texts to adolescents. Students will design lesson plans, develop units, and teach mini-lessons based on the materials covered in class. The goal of the course is to help prospective teachers forge intimate relationships with the works they may someday teach.

Requirements:
1) Students will be expected to attend all classes and to participate in class discussions.
2) Students will design and teach three lessons in front of their peers.
3) By the beginning of Spring Break, students will develop high school essay assignments for threee of the works we have considered in class. They will then write responses to those assignments. 2-3 pages for each essay quiestion.
4) By the end of the term, students will develop a curricumlum unit based on material that has not been discussed in class--a novel, a group of poems, a group of stories, or a group of essays. Students will provide answer keys for all the quizzes and tests and write written responses for all study and essay questions.
Note: The assumption of this course is that students---as advanced English majors--will have already read most, if not all, of the books to be covered, Discussions will begin with that understanding.
So, um, i volunteered to do Macbeth. (See #2.) Anyone have thoughts/suggestions?

Having everyone back is good, but having people being noisy outside my room is going to take some getting used to.

Saw Napoleon Dynamite. Um, what?

Quick poll:
[Poll #424433]

"Misery is expected to peak on Monday, as 24 January has been pinpointed as the worst day of the year."
::shrugs:: I would think the worst day would be earlier in January, when you're exhausted from Christmas and dark cold winter is swirling around you. By this late in January the days are longer and you've got February coming up and everything.

William Safire's retiring? Does any reason remain for me to continue reading the NYTimes? [I was propelled to this point by three remarkable bosses: [...] and the courageous publisher Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger, who in 1973 said he wanted "another point of view" on this page, and who stuck loyally with me when he got it. ; see also: my favorite NYTimes opener ever] Though reading some of the day's columns reminded me how much i dislike his style sometimes. Is there anyone i consistently like? Don't answer that.

Is it bad that my reaction to this was to WTF the fact that there are different laws regarding the burial of "human medical waste" versus human bodies?

"I wasn't suggesting moral relativism in the least, though a certain amount of it is necessary to exist in the world without going insane. I was suggesting that, morally and ethically, we're all obligated to confront our own motives. It's very, very easy to go after the Other, the figurehead who represents our fears and hate and insecurities."
-[livejournal.com profile] randomways

[livejournal.com profile] antheia posted a bit of a ramble about Spike, particularly post-"Seeing Red" and i replied saying "I agree with all your points." Her reply: "There is a first time for everything, and I, for one, feel a party coming on! :) "

I was recently talking to [livejournal.com profile] wisdomeagle about "my feelings towards/about Willow and Tara and Willow/Tara and how they changed as the series progressed" and now i have left a lengthy reply to a comment in [livejournal.com profile] antheia's LJ on the progression of Spike. I used to talk about writing a manifesto of my opinions on all political topics so i could just point people instead of making the same arguments over and over. I am now feeling compelled to do one of my opinions on all things Whedonverse. (It will of course take forever for either, nevermind both, of these to get written, but a girl can dream.)

Today, i:

Jan. 10th, 2005 10:08 pm
hermionesviolin: black and white photo of Emma Watson as Hermione, with text "hermionesviolin" (hermione by oatmilk)
Did errands, including paying my fines at Forbes, even though they don't freeze your account until you hit $10 and so almost never even tell me i have fines when i'm checking stuff out. Lost a button on my coat and did not backtrack to search for it, which i am now regretting because it was the middle button.

Approve of the purple hair. Am lacking an Emma.

Survived my first day at work sans AJ. Nia had sorted the mail and started on the filing, and there were only a few quirky things, and i got a huge chunk of the filing done, and there weren't too many phone calls. Am still anxious about the next 8 days, though. (Marla, everytime i send something over to Advancement i think of you :) P.S. We should have lunch sometime)

Keep seeing talk about the new Phantom of the Opera movie and can't bring myself to care since the book story didn't grab me. Am a h0r and wanna see Elektra, though. (Any Valley folk wanna go with me? I'm thinking Saturday.)

Saw my first Marlon Brando film. Oh, the number of times i wanted to hit Marlon Brando's character over the head with a baseball bat. Not to mention the stupidities of various other characters. And the inhumanity at the end... grrr. I have now seen "I coulda been a contenda" in context, though, which makes it damn poignant.

Will post my BtVS Metamorphosis Challenge fic unbetaed if no one's gonna offer to beta it for me. Having read [livejournal.com profile] fox1013's rant, i feel kinda shitty about not ever having my stuff betaed, but there's also that part of me that never gets my papers edited either -- stubborn Yank or whathaveyou.

Am scoring a cap and gown muchas gracias a [livejournal.com profile] hedy.

The album version of "Closed for Renovations" does not include the Rose Bowl bit, which makes me sad.

Expandmore on Classes of Doom )
hermionesviolin: (prophecy girl)
ENG 350: Literature, Folklore, and Fakelore
The Classic Fairy Tales (Tatar)
The Bloody Chamber (Carter)
King Lear (Shakespeare)
Wuthering Heights (Bronte)
The Vanishing Hitchhiker: Urban Legends and Their Meanings (Brunvand)

ENG 205: Telling and Retelling
Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf)
The Hours (Cunningham)
Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (Stevenson)
Mary Reilly (Martin)
Jane Eyre (Bronte)
Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys)
The Eyre Affair (Fforde)
The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne)
Hester (Bigsby)
King Lear (Shakespeare)
A Thousand Acres (Smiley)
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Hardy)
The French Lieutenant's Woman (Fowles)
Ourika (Duras, trans. Fowles)

ENG 490: Teaching Literature
English Teacher's Companion (Burke)
Death of a Salesman (Miller)
Pride and Prejudice (Austen)
Macbeth (Shakespeare)
Jane Eyre (Bronte)
The Scarlett Letter (Hawthorne)
Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
Beloved (Morrison)

REL 110: The Inklings: Religion and Imagination in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams
The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe (Lewis)
Surprised by Joy: Shape of my Early Life (Lewis)
Out of the Silent Planet (Lewis)
Mere Christianity (Lewis)
Letters of JRR Tolkien (ed. Carpenter)
Silmarillion (Tolkien)
Reader (Tolkien)
Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)
Perelandra (Lewis)
That Hideous Strength (Lewis)
Out-of-stock: The Inklings (Carpenter)
Recommended: The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth (Foster)

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hermionesviolin: an image of Alyson Hannigan (who plays Willow Rosenberg) with animated text "you think you know / what you are / what's to come / you haven't even / BEGUN" (Default)
Elizabeth (the delinquent, ecumenical)

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