Break is coming, which means book time

In the tradition, started last year, of thinking about and planning for Winter Break well before its due date, I have come up with a list of books/tv shows/things to read/watch/accomplish over break.  Hell yeah.

Books

American Gods – Neil Gaiman

A Game of Thrones – George R.R. Martin

A Clash of Kings – George R.R. Martin

A Storm of Swords – George R.R. Martin

And possibly the entirety of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  It’s always nice to dream, right?

Television

Buffy 1-7

Angel 3-5

Activities

Make my first vid, woo!

I’m going to, as my pal B says, keep pushing the ham through that keyhole, that is, keep writing.

Run run run run.

Chess chess chess.

Who can’t wait for all of this stuff?  This guy, that’s who.

The snow is glittering, which is unlike anything a true vampire would ever do.

This from the new story:

Rhodes looked around the room and had to squint to see through the shafts of gray moonlight coming through her roof.  Her cottage looked the same in the night as it did during the day: sparse, small, and haunted.  It’s true that the ghosts were easier to see at night, having a silver, luminescent image works much better away from the sun, but were they all the time, floating along the ceiling, playing chess with bits of non-corporeal body parts on a board Rhodes had scratched into her only table, a small wooden thing.  One ghost in particular, a tatterdemalion spirit of an old raider who had died in the hills nearby, sat just outside the door all day and night, alternating between guarding the home and posing riddles to the passing woodland creatures.

Rhodes again tried to yell out, this time with an intended target.  Cavendish, the oldest ghost in the house, arguably the wisest ghost in the house, and definitely the most crotchety ghost in the house, was snoring quietly in the inner-apex of the roof, a thin drip of sparkling drool falling slowly from the corner of his barely-opened mouth.  When her second attempt yielded similar results to the first, Rhodes began to panic, which is something that works especially well for the living because they can breath rapidly (and often hyperventilate, very good for panicking), flail their arms, run around in circles, talk or yell much too quickly for comprehension, and even let loose the full torrent of their bowels.  All of these things are great for panicking and Rhodes could do exactly none of them.  That’s not to say that she didn’t try and for just a second she thought she might still be able to wet the bed but it turned out it was just a bit of Cavendish’s drool that had fallen and, being essentially weightless and therefore at the whim of any stray air currents, landed on the bed.

In non-story related news, Winter, in his glittery splendor recently showed up in Morris.  The night air now chills and tears at exposed skin and the light of the sun sets the mounds of powdery white stuff aflame.  I associate the onset of winter in Morris to finishing finals and so, partially because of that and partially because I was finally able to hand in a huge assignment today, I spent the majority of tonight with a huge grin on my face.  The downside to this wonderful feeling — finals aren’t finished yet.  I still have considerable work to do on my grad. school applications, Woolf paper, and final paper for another class.  The end is in sight, but still out of reach.

Have I Been Spoiled or Have the Rules Changed?

I visited the library in my hometown on Tuesday.  My memories from that place are filled with the tales of Sherlock Holmes, the exploits of Dr. Doolittle, and the exciting adventures of Taran in Prydain.  I used to bike to that deceptively small building every day during the summer, spending hours in those ridiculously blocky and utterly uncomfortable chairs diving into any tale I could find.  Always, when I think of libraries, my mind wanders back to that simple, happy time and a little of the magic and mystery, that which hasn’t been killed by my recent hours of studying and essaying and homeworking, from childhood perceptions still twists and turns through my mind like a tendril of hazy fog, just out of reach but friendly with every other sense.  I visited the library in my hometown on Tuesday and every one of those happy memories disappeared when one of the librarians, amongst the vulture-like chattering of her coworkers, answered her cell phone and proceeded to have a conversation that, I may be going out on a limb here, seemed to have never even met the words ‘emergency’ or ‘important.’  Ironically, the sign taped to the glass doors, through which a patron enters, reads something like “Please turn off all cell phones, pagers, etc…”  Now, I assume this message is one made of politeness and civility for the other patrons present in the library, and as I sat in one of those chairs, you know, the uncomfortable, blocky ones, I could only sit and wonder what the hell had happened to my library.

Now, I realize I may have been spoiled.  Perhaps my memory of my hometown library has been romanticized by Time and my idea of libraries these days is obviously heavily influenced by the UMM Library.  True, the library here is often full of ebullient freshmen working in groups and making ribald statements with their “outside voices.”  However, the 1st floor of the library is often totally quiet, as is the 3rd floor (although slightly less so), and I’m almost positive that Albus Dumbledore himself would avada kedavra anyone who more than sneezed on the 4th floor.  But, the experience at my hometown library leaves me wondering if this kind of behavior in the library, the kind of disrespectful behavior that every movie I’ve ever seen involving libraries has attempted to subvert, (Shhhhh, this is a library), is running rampant everywhere these days.  What happened to the dignity inherent in these halls of books?  To where did the respect for learning and libraries go?  Maybe this is an isolated incident and I am simply overreacting.

Yeah, I don’t think so.  Even if this is the only instance of the idea behind a library being walked on, I still hate the idea of it happening.  I’m certainly not advocating some sort of speaking ban in libraries but I do think the right (yeah, right) of patrons should be respected, the right to an escape from the emergency whistle and fire engine red world outside, the right to a quiet place of study, the right to a hushed environment of academic pursuit and imaginative tomfoolery.  You are entitled to this and so am I and the only addendum is that neither one of us encroaches on the other’s library right.  The library should be a place of learning, of intellectual adventure, of creative journeying, and librarians like Mrs. Cell Phone are killing those opportunities for growth and exploration.

Something from Nothing

I’ve been in a funk for awhile now.  It’s been the can’t-focus, can’t-sleep, overly-stressed, slowly-dying kind of funk.  My brain feels like a too small container filled with too much yogurt, slow moving and berry-filled.  All of this grad. school crap coupled with the regular undergrad. crap, well, it’s a lot of poop and it’s everywhere.  Half of the time I feel like what my mother would call a space cadet, that is, a person whose mind is off on his or her own planet.  I used to be able to imagine the most vivid of scenes when I would go to bed, drifting off to sleepland was always a journey filled with thick, luscious forests and bizarre table-men but now I can only visit that happy place for a fraction of a moment before a hazy, grey (yes, I chose to spell that color that way) mist covers my imagination.  I can’t focus, even on the fun stuff, and it sucks.

Well, today was funkless.  I woke up, showered, and started planning out my hour-by-hour schedule, as I’ve done for awhile now.  I was heading on through the noon hour with a solid 1.5 hour block of To The Lighthouse when I realized something, something simple that should have hit me full in the face a long time ago.  I’ve been waking up every morning to plan out the things that I need to do and the real fact is this: I don’t have to do any of this.  I don’t have to work on grad. school apps, I don’t have to read To The Lighthouse, and I certainly don’t need to memorize the conjugation of Italian verbs.  I’ve always prided myself on a being a person who acts with excitement and passion, someone who strays from obligation in favor of being led by the heart.  Yet here I am, waking up every day and planning out a schedule full of things without any sense of meaning or importance.  So, I stopped.  I put my pen down, closed my notebook, and thought about what I want.  I want to go to grad. school and I want to be taking this Virginia Woolf class.  I want to be doing the things that I’m doing but I’d forgotten that.  My schedule didn’t really change any, I still planned out my hours the same way but I didn’t look at the list as a domineering overlord with a chagrined grimace and a dry whip.  Finally, I’ve got my focus and my passion back, the things that I like most about myself, and all it took was the realization that all I have to do is nothing.

Outside. The Trees are Shedding

Outside.  The trees are shedding

Coats of green and yellow

Shirts of autumnal crimson

And

Hats of goldenrod.

Outside.  The trees are shedding,

embracing the crisp apple air,

while the squirrels squirrel away

berries, autumnal crimson.

Outside.  The trees are shedding,

but inside, I am donning

insulated shirts and

colorful coats and

hats the color of

autumnal crimson.

Hey, GRE, go eat a box of rusty nails

Before I jump in, I just want to say this: I understand the need for something like the GRE.  Graduate schools need a cutoff point in order to adequately file down the amount of candidates up for not very many positions.  A standardized test is the easiest way for them to achieve this arbitrary slimming of the applicants, hence the GRE.  I get it.

But I still think the GRE is a shit test.  I just received my scores in the mail, and I was able to see how I had fared on the writing sections.  I did well because I had gotten two writing prompts to which I could directly tie ideas I’ve been talking about in my classes but I’m just wondering this: what if I hadn’t gotten those prompts?  What if I would have been given another totally legitimate and totally ungrounded question by the capricious ETS computer elf?  Writing quality, while not totally married to, is still directly linked to a writer’s understanding of a topic or idea.  If I had gotten a topic with which I had no experience and on which I couldn’t write very well, would I have gotten a worse score and therefore been deemed a mediocre or poor writer?  If the words I encountered on the verbal section were words I had never seen before, would that mean I was not A. a good English major? b. a well read individual? c. fit for graduate school work?  The answer to all of these questions should be a solid and resounding no but the real answer is a little closer to maybe.  If I had been given words I didn’t recognize on the verbal section, leading me to tanking it and rocking the 50th percentile, then I wouldn’t have made the cut-off for pretty much every school I would like to attend.  I have it on good information that some schools refuse to even consider an applicant if he or she does not have GRE scores above a certain percentile.  It’s not that they look at those scores in comparison with your GPA, your writing sample, your letters of recommendation, or your letter of intent.  Nope, these things don’t even see the light of the dingy committee boardroom because as soon as those GRE scores are out in the open, well, your boat has already sailed.  Yeah, I did alright on my GRE and my scores are good enough to jump through the arbitrary hoops that most of my schools have set up but really, all I’ve proved are these two things: I do well on standardized tests and I was lucky enough to run into words and prompts that I have seen before.  Neither of these two things has ANYTHING to do with intelligence, work ethic, dedication, or ability in my field, all traits of someone who can excel in graduate school and beyond.  But hey, I’m sure I’ll be fine, you know, since I know what ‘perspicacious’ and ‘paucity’ mean.

One of my very favorite things about writing is always having a story in my head.  Writing leaves a residual narrative in my head and no matter where I am, things are always moving around in there.  Oftentimes the only stuff to come out of that area of moto perpetuo is nonsensical and unworkable but every once in awhile an idea strikes on another of its kind like a flint and the spark that flares off becomes a key to a story, a step to the upstairs level of what I had thought was only a single level, ranch-style story without a basement or porch.  When that spark lights up my brain with little fizzes of narrative or plot, I can’t help but make a bee-line to the nearest form of word recorder, whether that is the pen/paper combo, my laptop, which I have named Wednesday, or scribbling all over the my forearm, which, coincidentally, doubles as a fleshy notepad.  Even though writing is difficult for me due to a myriad reasons, all legitimate at the time but useless in the long run, I always have a story happening in my head.

In A Funk

Things are piling up and for some reason unknown to me, I can’t seem to get anything done.  I’ve been making to-do lists and schedules all week but I am still behind on just about everything I need to get done.  I’m even having a difficult time doing the fun things, the stuff that I used to do instead of my homework, yeah, that’s not even happening.  So what have I been doing?  I have no freakin’ clue.  Time feels like a magic trick, of which I can only grasp a tiny bit while the rest gets lost in the magician’s voluminous hat.  Yuck, this blows.

Disjointed Thoughts on ‘The Hours’

“My life has been stolen from me…I’m living a life I have no wish to live.”

I just finished watching The Hours for my Virginia Woolf class and although I am still munching over it, I wanted to share some of my initial thoughts on what could be one of the better films I have ever seen.

The story is told in three parts, two of which are directly linked while the third is much more oblique in its connection to the other two.  The film is based on The Hours, a book by Michael Cunningham, which is in turn based on Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. As I’ve never read Cunningham’s book (although with this movie being its product, I believe I will) I will be speaking only to the film’s relation to Woolf’s novel.

As a stand-alone film, The Hours is a beautiful and tragic attempt at capturing the loneliness and despair one can find in life.  The English major in me was hard at work during the film; I was frantically scribbling down quotes like “I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark.”  This particular line is spoken by Nicole Kidman as she plays Virginia Woolf in the midst of writing Mrs. Dalloway.  On the surface, Woolf seems crazy and her suicide seems to support this.  However, if interpreted in the context of her novel, Woolf’s desire for isolation and death is actually a reflection of her need for not only an escape, but ultimately a catalyst for human connection.  As she notes, “someone has to die in order for the rest of us to value life…the poet, the visionary”  (movie).  Kidman brilliantly displays Woolf’s desperate understanding of the needs and functions of society and the final scene is at once a brief moment of clarity and a heart-wrenching emotional experience.  At the risk of becoming overdramatic and gushy, I will stop, but seriously, too much good in one place.

On another note, I thought it particularly interesting how the characters in the movie (and I’m assuming Cunningham’s novel) had traits of characters from Mrs. Dalloway but no one was a straight analog of another character.  Richard (Ed Harris) took the same route into the clearing at the end of the path as Septimus but instead of his chosen ending being forced by his experience in the War, Richard (originally the name of Clarissa’s husband in Woolf’s novel, mind you) it seems instead to be caused (at least mostly) by his mother’s abandonment of Richard, his father, and sister.  Harris’ character is not a true analog for any character because he is a combination of both Richard and Septimus while Clarissa is a combination of Mrs. Dalloway and Rezia.  I’ve not quite worked out the implications of this match-up in my mind but for now it will have to suffice it say this: hmmm, interesting.

A Trip to the Renaissance or Hello, Mr. Anachronism

B, K, and I visited the MN Renaissance festival today.  Apart from various “ye olde” signs and the other anachronisms that belonged in the Middle Ages (uhhh, Beowulf isn’t exactly Renaissance Literature, folks…) it was quite fun.  Turkey legs, drinking horns, suits of armor, and all the pottery anyone could ever need.  All in all, what more could you want?  As we were walking around and seeing the sights I couldn’t help but think: these are my people.  The nerds who think it’s cool to dress up in cloaks, dresses, and robes; those people are my kind of people.  I plan on making the study of Renaissance Lit. my life and the idea of a festival celebrating not only the people of that time but the art, the style, and the feeling of that time, well, it’s just plain awesome.

In other news, I picked up Jonathan L. Hamilton’s debut novel ‘Johannes Cabal: The Necromancer’ today.  I’m only about 25 pages in right now but it’s a lot of fun so far.  Hamilton is really comfortable on the page, his characters are quirky, and his lexicon is just short of colossal.  I’m really digging it.