In no particular order, here are the top 5 absolute best X-Mas Specials/Movies:
Muppets' Christmas Carol
Because as far as I'm concerned, the real Charles Dickens is the blue furry guy with the rat as a sidekick. Not to mention the "Marley and Marley" song is as absolutely terrifying as the rest of the movie is heartwarming.
Muppets' Family Christmas.
I would give the Muppets all ten spots, if I could. But this one definitely deserves to be here. All the Muppets get together at Fuzzy's mom's place, and they're joined by the Sesame Street Muppets, and the Fraggles. There's a special appearance by Henson himself, and nothing, nothing comes close to the sheer joy of watching the Swedish chef trying to find a way to cook Big Bird for supper.
The Grinch Who Stole Christmas
"You're a Mean One, Mister Grinch" is the one song I will still be singing long after all real Christmas carols have been emptied from my mind. And not to brag, but my heart grows three sizes every ten years. Apparently, it's a serious medical condition.
Invader Zim's "The Most Horrible X-Mas Ever"
Everyone's favorite space invader Zim gets the bright idea to build a special Santa suit to enslave humanity. Archnemesis Dib tries to expose him, but the suit has its own ideas... Hijinx, as always, ensue. For no particular reason, this episode is narrated in the far future by a cybernetic snowman telling it as a children's story to a group of minature alien monsters. And it probably says a lot about me that one of the funniest things I've ever seen comes from this episode: when one of the alien monsters points out a plothole, the snowman wordlessly picks him up and slides him under a couch. That's not just a good Christmas lesson. That's a lesson that can be applied all year round.
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. I add this one because there's a good chance my mom will read this list. Can I refill your eggnog for you? Get you something to eat? Drive you out to the middle of nowhere and leave you for dead?
Truly, so much to teach us all about the holiday cheer.
And that's my five. But what about yours? Post any beloved favorites here, and they can be properly judged and/or ridiculed by the masses.
Later Days.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Sunday, December 21, 2008
But how does using a frozen hotdog as a phallic comic prop make you FEEL?
Man, that's going to be another title that'll direct some really weird searches.
Anyway, I was at a party last night, and I had consumed a fair bit of alcohol. (It was the first time in a long time I'd drank heavily for two consecutive nights, since the night before that was my brothers' roommate's going-away party. And yet, the day after, in both cases: no hangover. Truly, I live a blessed life.) Often, when I'm drinking at a party, I get the urge to either work out math equations, or write down story ideas. This time, the muse that struck me belonged to the latter group. I hunted down a pen, and an available writing surface--a piece of discarded wrapping paper was the fist thing I found.
Sadly, looking at what I wrote in the light of day suggests that these inspirational works will not be among my best. The first thing written is "find a way to pun 'chronic' and 'chronicles.'" The second sounds like the voiceover for a movie trailer:
Every Doom has its Day.
Every Day has its Night.
Every Knight has its Fall.
Stories end.
Lucky for me, the important part at the moment is what happens after. A friend saw the writing (without being able to read it, and thus couldn't assess the quality of the writing) and commented, in a friendly manner, that observing people at parties must serve as good fodder for writing for me. I tried to deny this, since at the very least, it suggested a quality to what I had just written that even then I was pretty sure it did not have, but I think she's got a point. To paraphrase, I like to observe.
Don't get me wrong. Participating is great, and it's what all the cool kids are doing. I love a good conversation, and I'll take up any sort of endeavor that strikes me in the right way. But there's a part of me that really likes to take a step back, think about things, and reflect. (There's a connection between this and the post a few days ago about nocturnal walking, but I don't feel like teasing it out at the moment. Or bothering to link it. User unfriendly!) And a party's an ideal opportunity for this. People who are more honest than kind may suggest that this reflection comes from a lifetime of sitting by myself at parties in my formative years (and they'd be wrong. In my formative years, I stayed home. So there.), but I don't think it's a bad thing, not anymore. Like I said, I enjoy the interaction stuff. But there's a lot to be learned by thinking not just about what people are doing, but why.
I think I'll end this meandering with a quotation from Margaret Atwood, from her short story "Happy Endings," as to why it's important for a writer to spend time on the "why" as compared to the "whats:" and "wheres." This is Atwood, so it's slightly more cynical than it needs to be, but it gets the point across:
Later Days.
Anyway, I was at a party last night, and I had consumed a fair bit of alcohol. (It was the first time in a long time I'd drank heavily for two consecutive nights, since the night before that was my brothers' roommate's going-away party. And yet, the day after, in both cases: no hangover. Truly, I live a blessed life.) Often, when I'm drinking at a party, I get the urge to either work out math equations, or write down story ideas. This time, the muse that struck me belonged to the latter group. I hunted down a pen, and an available writing surface--a piece of discarded wrapping paper was the fist thing I found.
Sadly, looking at what I wrote in the light of day suggests that these inspirational works will not be among my best. The first thing written is "find a way to pun 'chronic' and 'chronicles.'" The second sounds like the voiceover for a movie trailer:
Every Doom has its Day.
Every Day has its Night.
Every Knight has its Fall.
Stories end.
Lucky for me, the important part at the moment is what happens after. A friend saw the writing (without being able to read it, and thus couldn't assess the quality of the writing) and commented, in a friendly manner, that observing people at parties must serve as good fodder for writing for me. I tried to deny this, since at the very least, it suggested a quality to what I had just written that even then I was pretty sure it did not have, but I think she's got a point. To paraphrase, I like to observe.
Don't get me wrong. Participating is great, and it's what all the cool kids are doing. I love a good conversation, and I'll take up any sort of endeavor that strikes me in the right way. But there's a part of me that really likes to take a step back, think about things, and reflect. (There's a connection between this and the post a few days ago about nocturnal walking, but I don't feel like teasing it out at the moment. Or bothering to link it. User unfriendly!) And a party's an ideal opportunity for this. People who are more honest than kind may suggest that this reflection comes from a lifetime of sitting by myself at parties in my formative years (and they'd be wrong. In my formative years, I stayed home. So there.), but I don't think it's a bad thing, not anymore. Like I said, I enjoy the interaction stuff. But there's a lot to be learned by thinking not just about what people are doing, but why.
I think I'll end this meandering with a quotation from Margaret Atwood, from her short story "Happy Endings," as to why it's important for a writer to spend time on the "why" as compared to the "whats:" and "wheres." This is Atwood, so it's slightly more cynical than it needs to be, but it gets the point across:
"You'll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it. Don't be deluded by any other endings, they're all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality.
"The only authentic ending is the one provided here:
John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.
"So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with.
"That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.
Now try How and Why."
I love trying How and Why. Aren't they fun?
Later Days.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Book Review: Flatland
While this intent wasn't really made clear the last time around, I fully meant for Book Review to become a regular feature, every time I finished a, you know, book. But that hasn't happened, and my opinion of all literature read between November till now must go sadly unrecorded in the annals of history.
Luckily, that's not the case for Flatland.
Flatland. By Edwin A. Abbott. The edition I read was the second edition, published in1884--actually, an electronic facsimile of the second edition, published in 1884, but let's not split hairs--and it's generally considered one of the earlier predecessors of science fiction. The plot--well, it's not really a plot, for starters. More like a concept. The concept is that a 2-dimensional being--a square, as it turns out--becomes aware of his nature of a 2-D being and attempts to explain himself and his world to the 3-D people.
The first half of the book is a description of the 2-D society, and the second half tells of the square's encounters in Lineland, No Dimensions, and Space. The first half is focused on the culture that results from a flat world, and that's really my favorite type of sci-fi: one high concept, then a careful consideration of how that change influences people, on macro and micro levels.
But while Flatland fulfills the basic criteria of a modern sci-fi story, it's very much a work of its own era. It reads a lot like an H. G. Wells novel, if that's a style you're familiar with. But there's no real plot, per se, and no overarching story; it's just the square character reciting what happened to him, in increasing fervour. I'm not really familiar enough with 19th century literature to know how typical a protagonist the square is. All right, obviously, he's not very typical, since he's, you know, a square, but he's got a male-dominated, upper-class entitled sort of attitude to him, and I'm not sure how much of that attitude Abbott is including to reflect ourselves in Flatland, and how much he just thinks that's what people are like.
There's some interesting stuff with the intersect between mathematics and theology, and I'm wondering how deliberate the inclusion of the millenial stuff is. (The square receives his vision on year 2000, in their Flatland timeline.) I also liked that Abbott switches from narrative to dialogue when the square is confronted with a sphere; it emphasizes the way the square has lost all sense of agency. It's super short, and can easily be squeezed into a single afternoon. And while there's nothing revolutionary to it, as an earlier pioneering work of science fiction, Flatland is actually more interesting in terms of high concept than a lot of the stuff people like Wells and Stoker were putting out in the general time. So, if you've got an afternoon to kill and a mild taste for geometry, give it a try.
Later Days.
Luckily, that's not the case for Flatland.
Flatland. By Edwin A. Abbott. The edition I read was the second edition, published in1884--actually, an electronic facsimile of the second edition, published in 1884, but let's not split hairs--and it's generally considered one of the earlier predecessors of science fiction. The plot--well, it's not really a plot, for starters. More like a concept. The concept is that a 2-dimensional being--a square, as it turns out--becomes aware of his nature of a 2-D being and attempts to explain himself and his world to the 3-D people.
The first half of the book is a description of the 2-D society, and the second half tells of the square's encounters in Lineland, No Dimensions, and Space. The first half is focused on the culture that results from a flat world, and that's really my favorite type of sci-fi: one high concept, then a careful consideration of how that change influences people, on macro and micro levels.
But while Flatland fulfills the basic criteria of a modern sci-fi story, it's very much a work of its own era. It reads a lot like an H. G. Wells novel, if that's a style you're familiar with. But there's no real plot, per se, and no overarching story; it's just the square character reciting what happened to him, in increasing fervour. I'm not really familiar enough with 19th century literature to know how typical a protagonist the square is. All right, obviously, he's not very typical, since he's, you know, a square, but he's got a male-dominated, upper-class entitled sort of attitude to him, and I'm not sure how much of that attitude Abbott is including to reflect ourselves in Flatland, and how much he just thinks that's what people are like.
There's some interesting stuff with the intersect between mathematics and theology, and I'm wondering how deliberate the inclusion of the millenial stuff is. (The square receives his vision on year 2000, in their Flatland timeline.) I also liked that Abbott switches from narrative to dialogue when the square is confronted with a sphere; it emphasizes the way the square has lost all sense of agency. It's super short, and can easily be squeezed into a single afternoon. And while there's nothing revolutionary to it, as an earlier pioneering work of science fiction, Flatland is actually more interesting in terms of high concept than a lot of the stuff people like Wells and Stoker were putting out in the general time. So, if you've got an afternoon to kill and a mild taste for geometry, give it a try.
Later Days.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Comic Book Wednesday: Fables' House of Cards
Ok, so it's not the most clever title ever. Here's the reviews.
Fables 79. By Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham. Fables has been on a role recently, and while this issue isn't quite as good as the last, it's still going strong. The big events this week are Charming's funeral and a sharp turn towards the worse for Fabletown at large. Oh, and the Mogli story continues. I added that as an afterthought, because the storyline still feels like an afterthought; each month, I feel like there isn't quite enough there. I would have preferred that Willingham just wrote a Mogli arc for a few months than just get the five pages or so. The Mister Dark and Beauty/Beast scenes forwarded both their plots slightly, but I'm ready for both to advance to something more. But the main stuff- the funeral is exactly appropriate, and is a testament to economical storytelling. And the big event IS a big event, and I definitely felt its impact. For that alone, this issue is a must-have for anyone following the series.
Avengers Initiative 19. By Dan Slott & Christos N. Gage and Harvey Tolibao & Bong Dazo. Having lost the war, the Skrulls initiate their scorched earth policy, and in order to stop them, the remaining Initiative teams need to take down four of the six substations, across six different states. Remember a few weeks ago when Marvel ended a multi-month "epic" crossover with a very boring fight scene? This is the fight scene that SHOULD have been. The action sequence in this issue is so high-octane that it almost errs in the other direction. As always with AI, the huge cast is a bit of a drawback: yes, some characters die here, but there's not really that many who's deaths have any meaning, because they haven't had the facetime needed to, well, matter. But Crusader's story is wrapped up, and in a compelling manner, and it's a REALLY good action sequence. Read it, if nothing else than for what Secret Invasion 8 should have been.
Spider-Man Noir 1 of 4. By David Hine with Fabrice Sapolsky and Carmine Di Giandomencio. As far as I can tell, the Noir line is basically a switching act: Marvel takes out the "super-hero" part of their characters, and replaces it with a heap of dark, broody noir style. A few weeks ago, the first issue of X-Men Noir came out, and the twist was that Professor Charles Xavier decided that psychopaths were the next step in human evolution, and created a school for training them. Here, the main plot is that it's the 1930s, and Peter Parker is a young agitator taking a stand with the unions against the factories and the mob men, lead by the criminal, the Goblin. The entire thing is narrated through the photographer Ben Urich. Hine and Sapolsky capture well the spirit of anger that permeates the comic, anger that those in power allowed things to come to such a point, and Giandomencio does a great job of conveying this anger and bitterness in a young Peter Parker. Judging on this issue and the X-Men, the Noir line is, through reflection, at least, going to be an interesting commentary on what defines superheroes, and what, beyond their powers, make these characters what they are, and keeps them from the path that both series seem to be heading.
Fables 79. By Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham. Fables has been on a role recently, and while this issue isn't quite as good as the last, it's still going strong. The big events this week are Charming's funeral and a sharp turn towards the worse for Fabletown at large. Oh, and the Mogli story continues. I added that as an afterthought, because the storyline still feels like an afterthought; each month, I feel like there isn't quite enough there. I would have preferred that Willingham just wrote a Mogli arc for a few months than just get the five pages or so. The Mister Dark and Beauty/Beast scenes forwarded both their plots slightly, but I'm ready for both to advance to something more. But the main stuff- the funeral is exactly appropriate, and is a testament to economical storytelling. And the big event IS a big event, and I definitely felt its impact. For that alone, this issue is a must-have for anyone following the series.
Avengers Initiative 19. By Dan Slott & Christos N. Gage and Harvey Tolibao & Bong Dazo. Having lost the war, the Skrulls initiate their scorched earth policy, and in order to stop them, the remaining Initiative teams need to take down four of the six substations, across six different states. Remember a few weeks ago when Marvel ended a multi-month "epic" crossover with a very boring fight scene? This is the fight scene that SHOULD have been. The action sequence in this issue is so high-octane that it almost errs in the other direction. As always with AI, the huge cast is a bit of a drawback: yes, some characters die here, but there's not really that many who's deaths have any meaning, because they haven't had the facetime needed to, well, matter. But Crusader's story is wrapped up, and in a compelling manner, and it's a REALLY good action sequence. Read it, if nothing else than for what Secret Invasion 8 should have been.
Spider-Man Noir 1 of 4. By David Hine with Fabrice Sapolsky and Carmine Di Giandomencio. As far as I can tell, the Noir line is basically a switching act: Marvel takes out the "super-hero" part of their characters, and replaces it with a heap of dark, broody noir style. A few weeks ago, the first issue of X-Men Noir came out, and the twist was that Professor Charles Xavier decided that psychopaths were the next step in human evolution, and created a school for training them. Here, the main plot is that it's the 1930s, and Peter Parker is a young agitator taking a stand with the unions against the factories and the mob men, lead by the criminal, the Goblin. The entire thing is narrated through the photographer Ben Urich. Hine and Sapolsky capture well the spirit of anger that permeates the comic, anger that those in power allowed things to come to such a point, and Giandomencio does a great job of conveying this anger and bitterness in a young Peter Parker. Judging on this issue and the X-Men, the Noir line is, through reflection, at least, going to be an interesting commentary on what defines superheroes, and what, beyond their powers, make these characters what they are, and keeps them from the path that both series seem to be heading.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
The stars were out too, which was nice.
I was out with some friends last night at a pub (definitely a pub, not a bar. The distinction is subtle, but significant.) and I walked home at around midnight afterwards. Putting aside the fact that I was walking in -30 weather--which is admittedly a lot to put aside--the walking itself was a welcome experience, just because it was such a familiar experience.
I've always enjoyed walking home by myself after a night at the bar. A part of it, I think, springs from fairly selfish motivations: after spending some time in the company of others, I want to immediately follow it with some "me" time. (Hence the reason that on such walks, I often stop by the local convenience store and purchase some entirely nonhealthy "me" foods.) There's also a safety valve issue: while it's not such a big issue anymore, I used to get a sensory overload when I was around a large group of people socially, and I needed some time to process by myself. But nowadays, the walk mainly gives me a chance to just dwell on the night, who I spent it with, and what they mean to me.
(Have I talked about the verb "dwell" in the past? I should have, because it's a favorite of mine. In the context, it means the same thing as thinking, but it also has connotations of home. I like that--the idea that your thoughts are a mental embodiment.)
Last night in particular, it was a mix of old and new. I don't do a lot of the night walk in Blank, so it had a heavy nostalgia flavor to it; this flavour was somewhat tempered since I was walking with my I-Pod, something that did NOT occur in the old days, since I didn't have an I-pod back then. But at least it made me feel less crazy for singing loudly in a public street at 12:00 am in the morning.
The best part of the walk (not the evening, which of course was the conversations with friends) was when I went past a house with a sign in the window that said "Have a Great Day!!". I deliberately chose my path so that I'd be going by the sign, and I had been really hoping it was still there. For more times than I can count, I've passed that sign late at night, still warm with the glow of the evening. And maybe it's because I'm usually a little drunk (ok, it's probably because I'm drunk) but it never fails to make me smile. It's just such a positive thing, a simple act of benevolence. It's a wish of good will to complete strangers, with no strings attached. And I think we all need that sometimes.
Cold Weather Running Aside: People get all kinds of excited when they see someone in a ski mask running quickly towards them.
Later Days.
I've always enjoyed walking home by myself after a night at the bar. A part of it, I think, springs from fairly selfish motivations: after spending some time in the company of others, I want to immediately follow it with some "me" time. (Hence the reason that on such walks, I often stop by the local convenience store and purchase some entirely nonhealthy "me" foods.) There's also a safety valve issue: while it's not such a big issue anymore, I used to get a sensory overload when I was around a large group of people socially, and I needed some time to process by myself. But nowadays, the walk mainly gives me a chance to just dwell on the night, who I spent it with, and what they mean to me.
(Have I talked about the verb "dwell" in the past? I should have, because it's a favorite of mine. In the context, it means the same thing as thinking, but it also has connotations of home. I like that--the idea that your thoughts are a mental embodiment.)
Last night in particular, it was a mix of old and new. I don't do a lot of the night walk in Blank, so it had a heavy nostalgia flavor to it; this flavour was somewhat tempered since I was walking with my I-Pod, something that did NOT occur in the old days, since I didn't have an I-pod back then. But at least it made me feel less crazy for singing loudly in a public street at 12:00 am in the morning.
The best part of the walk (not the evening, which of course was the conversations with friends) was when I went past a house with a sign in the window that said "Have a Great Day!!". I deliberately chose my path so that I'd be going by the sign, and I had been really hoping it was still there. For more times than I can count, I've passed that sign late at night, still warm with the glow of the evening. And maybe it's because I'm usually a little drunk (ok, it's probably because I'm drunk) but it never fails to make me smile. It's just such a positive thing, a simple act of benevolence. It's a wish of good will to complete strangers, with no strings attached. And I think we all need that sometimes.
Cold Weather Running Aside: People get all kinds of excited when they see someone in a ski mask running quickly towards them.
Later Days.
Monday, December 15, 2008
THERE. THERE IT IS. IT'S FINISHED AND I'M HAPPY :)
Please excuse the emoticon. It won't happen again, I promise.
It reflects, however, that I have now officially entered the holiday spirit, since my paper on Bernard Mandeville is finished. (well, actually, it needs a round of editing, a spell-check, page numbers added, and a title, but why split hairs?) It was pretty much the only thing I had to do since coming back, and it was weighing pretty heavily on me. Luckily, it turned out to be one of those essays where I just sit down and the ideas flow out, into the keyboard, and onto the screen. I think I almost resent those more: if all the ideas are there, and I KNOW they're there, typing them out seems so redundant that it actually offends me to be forced to do it. I know that makes very little sense, but that's why they're called emotions instead of logical tenets.
I was also a little worried about length, since the paper was to be 15-20 pages, and there was a point when I would have been certain I would barely squeeze in at 14 1/2. Well, I'm standing at 20 now, and the addition of the title, name, and date may just push the whole thing over to 21. I like meeting the upper end of a page length requirement; it allows me to feel very accomplished.
But the main source of worriment on this essay was that I did rather terribly on my presentation. It was a general overview on how the satirists of the eighteenth century undermined the authority of the medical practitioners, and the professor flagalated me for:
-relying too heavily on material discussed in class
-relying too heavily on a single critic rather than my own ideas or actual primary texts
-summarizing rather than arguing
-choosing a topic that was too broad
All of which was fair enough, to be honest. So I scraped that direction entirely, and a new idea eventually came to me. (Honestly, these occasional brilliant lightning bolts of ideas that come out of nowhere are the best part of grad school, and basically the only things that suggest to me I'm in the right field.) New idea: an eighteenth century writer named Bernard Mandeville made basically a career out of saying that the English economy is propelled by the production of vice-filled goods. I wanted to show that he practiced what he preached, that through promoting his own written works, he promoted his own vice-filled commodity, the book, and set up terms for how that book should be consumed. And I do all this by a close-reading of his final, and often ignored book, A Letter to Dion, in which he defends his most famous work, The Fable of the Hive, from an attack a man named Dion made on it in Dion's book, Alciphron.
So, as an argument based on a close-reading of a little-known author's most obscure work that itself was a response to a response of his best work, I'm hoping that I've dealt with most of the complaints with my presentation. And I feel good that I've done that, and that I've written a good essay that stands on its own.
On the other hand, it's a course about satire and the city in the eighteenth century, and I've written a paper that is about neither a) satire, nor b) the city. So even though I've discussed the topic with the professor, if he/she wanted to get nasty about it, she/he could really ding me on that front.
But hey, at least I got the century right. That counts for something, right?
Later HoliDays.
It reflects, however, that I have now officially entered the holiday spirit, since my paper on Bernard Mandeville is finished. (well, actually, it needs a round of editing, a spell-check, page numbers added, and a title, but why split hairs?) It was pretty much the only thing I had to do since coming back, and it was weighing pretty heavily on me. Luckily, it turned out to be one of those essays where I just sit down and the ideas flow out, into the keyboard, and onto the screen. I think I almost resent those more: if all the ideas are there, and I KNOW they're there, typing them out seems so redundant that it actually offends me to be forced to do it. I know that makes very little sense, but that's why they're called emotions instead of logical tenets.
I was also a little worried about length, since the paper was to be 15-20 pages, and there was a point when I would have been certain I would barely squeeze in at 14 1/2. Well, I'm standing at 20 now, and the addition of the title, name, and date may just push the whole thing over to 21. I like meeting the upper end of a page length requirement; it allows me to feel very accomplished.
But the main source of worriment on this essay was that I did rather terribly on my presentation. It was a general overview on how the satirists of the eighteenth century undermined the authority of the medical practitioners, and the professor flagalated me for:
-relying too heavily on material discussed in class
-relying too heavily on a single critic rather than my own ideas or actual primary texts
-summarizing rather than arguing
-choosing a topic that was too broad
All of which was fair enough, to be honest. So I scraped that direction entirely, and a new idea eventually came to me. (Honestly, these occasional brilliant lightning bolts of ideas that come out of nowhere are the best part of grad school, and basically the only things that suggest to me I'm in the right field.) New idea: an eighteenth century writer named Bernard Mandeville made basically a career out of saying that the English economy is propelled by the production of vice-filled goods. I wanted to show that he practiced what he preached, that through promoting his own written works, he promoted his own vice-filled commodity, the book, and set up terms for how that book should be consumed. And I do all this by a close-reading of his final, and often ignored book, A Letter to Dion, in which he defends his most famous work, The Fable of the Hive, from an attack a man named Dion made on it in Dion's book, Alciphron.
So, as an argument based on a close-reading of a little-known author's most obscure work that itself was a response to a response of his best work, I'm hoping that I've dealt with most of the complaints with my presentation. And I feel good that I've done that, and that I've written a good essay that stands on its own.
On the other hand, it's a course about satire and the city in the eighteenth century, and I've written a paper that is about neither a) satire, nor b) the city. So even though I've discussed the topic with the professor, if he/she wanted to get nasty about it, she/he could really ding me on that front.
But hey, at least I got the century right. That counts for something, right?
Later HoliDays.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
The Prodigal Son Returns Home...
Nothing drives home the "life-long student" status like calling a university campus "home." But honestly, when I made a brief sojourn to the University of Somewhere Else today, it felt like going home. Honestly, it's as much as a home to me as anywhere else. It's been almost a decade since I left Where Else, Blank is still too new, and I never stayed at any of my actual homes in Somewhere Else long enough to really make them feel like a "home." (Ok, the previous sentence makes absolutely no sense unless you know where Where Else, Blank, and Somewhere Else refer to. Oh, the price paid for anonymity.)
So anyway, the university campus gets a "home" designation. I went over to campus today to have lunch with some old English grad friends--which was great--and to take out some books via the national library agreement, which was less great, but also less of a hassle than I was fearing. I also took the opportunity to just walk around campus a bit, which was tres weird--like I was tourist looking at scenes of my past. I wrote about this more extensively in a short piece called "the Couple" ("Person of Consequence! You can't put in a plug for an unpublished work! " "Oh, can't I? That sounds like a challenge to me!" "No, I mean, there's no point... you know what? Never mind."), but it's amazing how much a person's life--by which I mean this Person's life-- can be influenced by the people they run into on a daily basis. I don't even mean friends and family; I mean just the people you see on a regular basis, and never talk to, never approach, and never really know at all. These people become a part of my personal context; just by being there, they contribute to my sense of familiarity. It's like a nice warm blanket of sameness.
Sadly, this being December, most of the actual students are busy studying, so they weren't around to contribute to my personal people-blanket. (Very selfish of them.) The people at the library provided enough scraps to make a few quilt patches, the students who were present provided the design, and, as always, my friends were the threads that bind the whole thing together. (Awwwww.)
Arts and crafts aside, it was fun to return to the alma mater, and I think that the books I found finally gave me a solid approach to my paper. But here's hoping that future ventures in the next week feature more of the friend side of the equation than the work side.
Later D--
Oooh! Almost forgot. No trip down nostalgia lane would be complete without a brisk trot through lunch at the campus restaurant. And however much anything else has changed, their student bargain-priced grilled cheese is EXACTLY how I remember. If the campus is a quilt, then that restaurant is definitely a... signature stitching form? A matching throw-pillow? A ketchup stain in the upper right corner that draws the eye?
...I think think this metaphor has gotten away from me.
Later Days.
So anyway, the university campus gets a "home" designation. I went over to campus today to have lunch with some old English grad friends--which was great--and to take out some books via the national library agreement, which was less great, but also less of a hassle than I was fearing. I also took the opportunity to just walk around campus a bit, which was tres weird--like I was tourist looking at scenes of my past. I wrote about this more extensively in a short piece called "the Couple" ("Person of Consequence! You can't put in a plug for an unpublished work! " "Oh, can't I? That sounds like a challenge to me!" "No, I mean, there's no point... you know what? Never mind."), but it's amazing how much a person's life--by which I mean this Person's life-- can be influenced by the people they run into on a daily basis. I don't even mean friends and family; I mean just the people you see on a regular basis, and never talk to, never approach, and never really know at all. These people become a part of my personal context; just by being there, they contribute to my sense of familiarity. It's like a nice warm blanket of sameness.
Sadly, this being December, most of the actual students are busy studying, so they weren't around to contribute to my personal people-blanket. (Very selfish of them.) The people at the library provided enough scraps to make a few quilt patches, the students who were present provided the design, and, as always, my friends were the threads that bind the whole thing together. (Awwwww.)
Arts and crafts aside, it was fun to return to the alma mater, and I think that the books I found finally gave me a solid approach to my paper. But here's hoping that future ventures in the next week feature more of the friend side of the equation than the work side.
Later D--
Oooh! Almost forgot. No trip down nostalgia lane would be complete without a brisk trot through lunch at the campus restaurant. And however much anything else has changed, their student bargain-priced grilled cheese is EXACTLY how I remember. If the campus is a quilt, then that restaurant is definitely a... signature stitching form? A matching throw-pillow? A ketchup stain in the upper right corner that draws the eye?
...I think think this metaphor has gotten away from me.
Later Days.
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