Monday, May 31, 2004
Spotted, on e-bay:
-- A pair of shoes, with a "genuine suede leather footbed" -- an "animal free product!"
-- Another pair (same seller) which apparently "defines the meaning of sex appeal."
-- A pair of shoes, with a "genuine suede leather footbed" -- an "animal free product!"
-- Another pair (same seller) which apparently "defines the meaning of sex appeal."
New York notes
The nice thing about tall buildings... great views. Am currently looking out over a fairly large chunk of New Jersey -- not a bad view, especially in the late afternoons when the light turns everything green and silver. Though it's a bit prettier if I lean to the right a bit and look at Ellis Island too. Or wander the halls and check out the views of the East River... or the Empire State Building...
Yesterday the steel-drums guy was at the 14th Street station again -- he's friendly, has an accent I can't quite identify but if pressed I'd guess some balmy tropical island, and is really quite good. I was rather impressed by the Fur Elise/Take 5 medley. Yesterday he played Hava Nagila.
The nice thing about tall buildings... great views. Am currently looking out over a fairly large chunk of New Jersey -- not a bad view, especially in the late afternoons when the light turns everything green and silver. Though it's a bit prettier if I lean to the right a bit and look at Ellis Island too. Or wander the halls and check out the views of the East River... or the Empire State Building...
Yesterday the steel-drums guy was at the 14th Street station again -- he's friendly, has an accent I can't quite identify but if pressed I'd guess some balmy tropical island, and is really quite good. I was rather impressed by the Fur Elise/Take 5 medley. Yesterday he played Hava Nagila.
Sunday, May 23, 2004
Done. :-D
Amazing! This past year has felt, at times, interminable... and yet here I am, all done, with nothing to do but celebrate, pack up, and leave. The celebrating was completed very much to my satisfaction -- thanks to A.B., A.E., J.G., and J.W. for a lovely evening. (And thanks to Zinc for a truly fabulous dining experience -- far exceeded my expectations and manages to pull off a wonderfully complicated, eclectic array of dishes with skill and elegance. Just reading/discussing the menu took us over half an hour!)
The packing, on the other hand, is unfortunately proving no small feat. What on earth would we do without subletters? If I never had to make space for someone else to stay in my room, I might well keep accumulating clothing, paper, clothing, empty cardboard boxes, clothing, and shoes until there was no space left even to sleep!
Well, tomorrow I take off for a whole summer's worth of new and exciting experiences. Wish me luck!
Amazing! This past year has felt, at times, interminable... and yet here I am, all done, with nothing to do but celebrate, pack up, and leave. The celebrating was completed very much to my satisfaction -- thanks to A.B., A.E., J.G., and J.W. for a lovely evening. (And thanks to Zinc for a truly fabulous dining experience -- far exceeded my expectations and manages to pull off a wonderfully complicated, eclectic array of dishes with skill and elegance. Just reading/discussing the menu took us over half an hour!)
The packing, on the other hand, is unfortunately proving no small feat. What on earth would we do without subletters? If I never had to make space for someone else to stay in my room, I might well keep accumulating clothing, paper, clothing, empty cardboard boxes, clothing, and shoes until there was no space left even to sleep!
Well, tomorrow I take off for a whole summer's worth of new and exciting experiences. Wish me luck!
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Excised from my paper, the following phrase: "...in addition to additional miscellaneous proposals."
Whoa. Was I really this tired when I wrote the last draft? :-)
Whoa. Was I really this tired when I wrote the last draft? :-)
Never. In my life. Have I consumed so much caffeine. And slept so little. For so long.
Bad, bad. Bad for me, bad for those poor exams I am butchering willy-nilly. Plus now there's an enormous (hopefully non-biting) mosquito in my bathroom and I am too tired to face the thought of crushing it and having to dispose of the remains.
Ah well. At least I haven't broken my no-technical-all-nighters(-for-schoolwork-purposes) rule during these last two uber-stressful weeks. Yeah, given that I can barely keep my eyes open as it is, seems unlikely that particular milestone will be reached today.
I know there will be elation in about 20 hours when exams and paper are all done. Just not quite feeling it yet.
Bad, bad. Bad for me, bad for those poor exams I am butchering willy-nilly. Plus now there's an enormous (hopefully non-biting) mosquito in my bathroom and I am too tired to face the thought of crushing it and having to dispose of the remains.
Ah well. At least I haven't broken my no-technical-all-nighters(-for-schoolwork-purposes) rule during these last two uber-stressful weeks. Yeah, given that I can barely keep my eyes open as it is, seems unlikely that particular milestone will be reached today.
I know there will be elation in about 20 hours when exams and paper are all done. Just not quite feeling it yet.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Baby's Named a Bad, Bad Thing. Funny. Mean, but funny.
Saturday, May 15, 2004
"And the moon's never seen me before..."
Current fascinations: Sam Phillips ("Reflecting Light" et al.), summer weather, spending time with friends, living vicariously through television characters sweet and serious, a perfect shade of yellow somewhere between sunshine and butter.
I have to say, iTunes really is a marvelous thing -- for me, for the music industry. I've never been much of a CD buyer -- if I'm going to invest in something, it will typically be either classical music or something else sufficiently classic that I don't expect to tire of it any time soon (Simon & Garfunkel, Gipsy Kings, and so on). But if I can just buy the song or two that I want off an album, and not all the filler, well then... The result being that not only have I, in the few months since it first came out, bought on iTunes more than the equivalent of the number of CDs I would normally have purchased in the same time, but I have also bought more CDs than usual. After all, until I get an iPod and the nifty portable speakers (*sigh*), if I want to hear something I like on a halfway decent sound system, I need a physical CD anyway. Most importantly, I am finding lots of new music I like! Anyway, that's my iTunes plug. Get it, love it.
Have successfully survived my first exam, which leaves me with two and a paper to go. Am being productive today -- that is, when I'm not wandering out in the sun...
Current fascinations: Sam Phillips ("Reflecting Light" et al.), summer weather, spending time with friends, living vicariously through television characters sweet and serious, a perfect shade of yellow somewhere between sunshine and butter.
I have to say, iTunes really is a marvelous thing -- for me, for the music industry. I've never been much of a CD buyer -- if I'm going to invest in something, it will typically be either classical music or something else sufficiently classic that I don't expect to tire of it any time soon (Simon & Garfunkel, Gipsy Kings, and so on). But if I can just buy the song or two that I want off an album, and not all the filler, well then... The result being that not only have I, in the few months since it first came out, bought on iTunes more than the equivalent of the number of CDs I would normally have purchased in the same time, but I have also bought more CDs than usual. After all, until I get an iPod and the nifty portable speakers (*sigh*), if I want to hear something I like on a halfway decent sound system, I need a physical CD anyway. Most importantly, I am finding lots of new music I like! Anyway, that's my iTunes plug. Get it, love it.
Have successfully survived my first exam, which leaves me with two and a paper to go. Am being productive today -- that is, when I'm not wandering out in the sun...
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Exams...
In the next week and a half or so, I will be taking three exams, finishing up one paper, and, um, moving to New York. Which is no small feat, as anyone who has seen the current state of my room can attest. Indeed, the messiness of my room generally serves as an excellent proxy for the degree of my stress. First exam is tomorrow, and I am woefully unprepared despite my semi-successful resolution to be much more diligent about reading for class than I have been in past semesters. Not quite diligent enough, I guess. Strangely, though, while studying for this thing has been rather painful on the whole, I am truly having a grand old time with the doctrines of abstention, exhaustion, and preclusion. Odd. Very odd. :-)
In the next week and a half or so, I will be taking three exams, finishing up one paper, and, um, moving to New York. Which is no small feat, as anyone who has seen the current state of my room can attest. Indeed, the messiness of my room generally serves as an excellent proxy for the degree of my stress. First exam is tomorrow, and I am woefully unprepared despite my semi-successful resolution to be much more diligent about reading for class than I have been in past semesters. Not quite diligent enough, I guess. Strangely, though, while studying for this thing has been rather painful on the whole, I am truly having a grand old time with the doctrines of abstention, exhaustion, and preclusion. Odd. Very odd. :-)
Sunday, May 02, 2004
Personally, I wouldn't complain if the speech were good...
P.C. points out this amusing quote from a disgruntled undergraduate after Kermit the Frog delivered the graduation address: "I've been laboring for five years and now we have a sock talking at our commencement."
P.C. points out this amusing quote from a disgruntled undergraduate after Kermit the Frog delivered the graduation address: "I've been laboring for five years and now we have a sock talking at our commencement."
Byatt-inspired
Spotted the following on Froogle.
A few of the items recently found with Froogle:
storage boxes; infant car seat; monocular; bridal shoes; tachometer; clear computer case; ganesh; body glove wetsuit; fuji film; mouth guard; duffel bag; tennis bracelet; docking station; shower curtain hooks; massage chair; sea salt; bobbleheads; trackman mouse; blinds; shoe stretcher; fountains; chef hat; hamper; digital camcorder; accordion.
Actually it read funnier before I put the semi-colons in...
Spotted the following on Froogle.
A few of the items recently found with Froogle:
storage boxes; infant car seat; monocular; bridal shoes; tachometer; clear computer case; ganesh; body glove wetsuit; fuji film; mouth guard; duffel bag; tennis bracelet; docking station; shower curtain hooks; massage chair; sea salt; bobbleheads; trackman mouse; blinds; shoe stretcher; fountains; chef hat; hamper; digital camcorder; accordion.
Actually it read funnier before I put the semi-colons in...
Went to see A.S. Byatt speak at the local public library yesterday. She was just as clever, and just as British, as one might expect -- dry humor, a certain reserve, and a slightly wicked little smile especially when reading the dark fairy stories from her newest book. She read a bit from two of the stories, then took questions from the audience. Apparently at least some of her stories ("The Thing in the Forest", for one) were inspired by her experience growing up as a child during the Second World War, living through all that suffering with parents who did their best to act like everything was okay. She talked a lot about sentences and paragraphs needing to be alive -- in reading to an audience one can sense immediately, she says, whether a sentence is "dead". An indefinable thing, sort of like when a musical phrase "works", I suppose -- there is no formula, and what one composer can achieve with one repeated note another can't do with scales and leaps and movement. A short story can't support a single dead sentence; on the other hand, a novel can have a lot of bad writing and still be a good novel.
I especially appreciated her take on literary criticism, which she characterizes as too much professionalized and too little about reading. And her feeling on being labeled a Woman Writer ("with two capital Ws") -- though some women authors write to fill that gap, and that's perfectly fine, she doesn't and would prefer to have her work judged on its own terms. Part of the reason she chooses to use "A.S.", though it is mostly an aesthetic decision (just sounds better, like T.S. Eliot). A lot of her dissatisfaction with feminist literary criticism, especially as applied to authors who never intended to fit that mold, comes out in Possession, so far the only one of her books that I've read. I'm working on that part -- was feeling inspired after the talk and went out and picked up The Virgin in the Garden (as well as Nabokov's Pale Fire...) Overall, her message seems to be that reading and criticism should not be as divergent as they have become -- which suggests that not only should critics do more reading [highly amusing anecdote about a graduate thesis for which she served as the outside evaluator: upon asking the student whether she had read George Eliot or Jane Austen or any other women authors before making her claim that Charlotte Bronte epitomized women's writing, she received a reply along the lines of "Do you have any idea how much feminist theory I've had to read? I don't have time for novels!!"], but also that we readers should do a bit more criticism.
A few unrelated notes: yes, I know my permalinks aren't working. Will get around to fixing them at some point. Also, watched Whale Rider yesterday -- it's good! Rent it. And finally -- as I mentioned before, and as should be evident from this post, I'm definitively adopting the British/Canadian usage regarding punctuation in and out of quotes. If it bothers... tough luck. :-)
I especially appreciated her take on literary criticism, which she characterizes as too much professionalized and too little about reading. And her feeling on being labeled a Woman Writer ("with two capital Ws") -- though some women authors write to fill that gap, and that's perfectly fine, she doesn't and would prefer to have her work judged on its own terms. Part of the reason she chooses to use "A.S.", though it is mostly an aesthetic decision (just sounds better, like T.S. Eliot). A lot of her dissatisfaction with feminist literary criticism, especially as applied to authors who never intended to fit that mold, comes out in Possession, so far the only one of her books that I've read. I'm working on that part -- was feeling inspired after the talk and went out and picked up The Virgin in the Garden (as well as Nabokov's Pale Fire...) Overall, her message seems to be that reading and criticism should not be as divergent as they have become -- which suggests that not only should critics do more reading [highly amusing anecdote about a graduate thesis for which she served as the outside evaluator: upon asking the student whether she had read George Eliot or Jane Austen or any other women authors before making her claim that Charlotte Bronte epitomized women's writing, she received a reply along the lines of "Do you have any idea how much feminist theory I've had to read? I don't have time for novels!!"], but also that we readers should do a bit more criticism.
A few unrelated notes: yes, I know my permalinks aren't working. Will get around to fixing them at some point. Also, watched Whale Rider yesterday -- it's good! Rent it. And finally -- as I mentioned before, and as should be evident from this post, I'm definitively adopting the British/Canadian usage regarding punctuation in and out of quotes. If it bothers... tough luck. :-)
