Saturday, April 30, 2005

Game day

today was game day - I did pretty much nothing that had to do with studying, which was a really welcome break - I got a chance to see how the other side lives between Friday night book club and Saturday all day pretend-I'm-not-insane-going-to-grad-school-with-a-family relaxing, not working kind of thing.

Went to the North Shore to pick up friends from home, train, home, then for lunch (very! good), then the original plan was for tennis, but since it was raining buckets, we opted for pool instead. Driving home, I tried to recall the last time I'd played pool, and I'm not sure I've ever actually played in MA before... so it's been a while.

I like the game, but as with most other games, I suck at it (goes with the job description when you're a klutz). I know what I need to do, but still tend to not be able to pull it off. The worst part for me is a power shot - I tend to back off on the follow through and dip the cue tip down at the last moment, which of course, tends to make balls fly into the air. I hate breaking because I'm so bad at it - the balls end up looking like a couple of city kids wandered into a redneck bar and are all clustering together for protection.

But I got talked into breaking. I dubbed my performance "the flying scratch" because the cue ball hit the 1, flew up into the air, and straight into the left corner pocket - didn't even come back down onto the table. Looked like I'd been aiming to sink the cue ball into that corner pocket the whole time. Wish I could drop a basketball that beautifully!

Weird part was, it musta been some kind of bad omen, 'cause the next three plays all scratched, and, the player who followed me scratched three turns in a row. Weird.

Came home, hoping the man had got enough studying done to go out, but not. Instead, we watched the two youngest play chess (and dropping hints in the form of timely reminders about how players can move, strategy and the rules of the game). They played a pretty close game, though middle one made a few safety moves that cost her the edge she otherwise might have had. Then the youngest and I played scrabble. She gave me a run for my money until I triple-worded "quarts" and then "quiz" off the same corner. But it was a close game.

Nice day.

Thursday, April 28, 2005

Slip sliding away

This morning I was just in a bit of a bored-kind-of-funk because I'd finished a couple of little projects and was wondering which of the bazillion things I should tackle first on my to do list (something that always makes me a little wooly in the head).

Now I'm just in a funk - a little pissed off/a little depressed about it all.

The $300 cheque in the mail didn't even cheer me up.

Good thing I didn't run into my friend (even though I was supposed to see her today) 'cause then she woulda had two grouchy people come across her path...(though if I had seen her, I probably wouldn't have been grouchy, so I guess it would be a moot point). My only enjoyment right now is guessing who it was she passed in the hall.

R - if it's who I think it is, that's just his usual look!

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Trying to actually use my brain today

My online bookgroup started a discussion about whether place can be character. The thread began when one of the members heard an author's talk (Geraldine Brooks) in which the author said she thinks of place as a character when she researches/writes.

So far, so good. But of course a couple of people objected to this statement, the most succinct objection was: "Setting is a character. Plot is a character. Who really needs characters any more? She shouldn't be trying to write novels unless she knows the difference."

It occured to me that the distinction between actor and actant in Greimas's 'actantial model' might be useful, so this is what I posted:

I wonder if it might help to think of A.J. Greimas's model of actants as a way of having your cake and eating it too.

Greimas differentiates between actants and actors. Actants are figures or types, like hero, or villain, or princess, or troll... (he developed the theory in response to Propp's work with fairytales). Actants are what drives the action - think of fairytales - the king demands that his sons perform an act, which starts the story off (and usually the youngest one is the only one who is successful). When they meet an old crone/wise woman/sage and receive a magical talisman, that's another actant. The actant is a role or a type and whatever it does, it moves the story forward.

Actors on the other hand are individual incarnations of these roles. Thus, actors can fulfill several actant roles.

In this model then, couldn't place fulfill an actant role? If you think of fairytales again, say Hansel and Gretel, the witch's house fulfills an actant role as a temptation. If Hansel and Gretel hadn's stopped to eat the house, then they wouldn't have gotten caught, and the story would be a rather dull one about children wandering around in a forest. The house isn't a character, since it isn't internally motivated to tempt the children, but by acting as a temptation, it drives the narrative forward.

It doesn't just work for fairytales either. Think of the house in _Amityville Horror_, or the Congo in _Heart of Darkness_; without those specific places, the narrative would unfold very differently, would it not?

In this model, characters are still characters, but it is still possible for a place to play a role that's more important than just simply backdrop (however beautifully written or exotic that backdrop might be).

Just wondering...


What do you think?

Saturday, April 23, 2005

Sin City

Okay, so this movie is stuck in my head, even though I watched it last night and that usually means it was a good movie ('good' at least in a 'makes michele think' kind of way). So if you haven't seen it (and it's been out for a while, so you should've already) don't read 'cause there might be spoilers, yadda, yadda etc. 'nuff said.

Stylistically, I thought of Sky Captain and the World of Tommorrow - though the acting in this one was better, probably in part because the effects were created in the editing studio after shooting on actual sets as opposed to against a blue screen, and Hulk in the attempt to replicate the comic/graphic novel structure. I even found myself comparing the gritty black and white 'traced' aesthetics of this film with the brilliant-over-the-top-color of Dick Tracy (yeah, I know that's going back a bit).

The structuralist in me *gasp! strucuralist!?* was fascinated with the representation of the epidodic nature of comics/graphic novels in the movie. Hulk used multi-pane windows to indicate concurrent activity, which closely replicates the actual structure of the comic book genre, but Sin City used an episodic, temporally overlapping series of narratives to express the same thing. This second strategy does produce a sense of confusion in the viewer momentarily (particularly when Kevin (re)appears in the Nancy narrative, but then doesn't threaten anyone), but its advantage is that it creates a disconnect between scenes that, although belonging to different story lines, would otherwise be juxtaposed and seem therefore to be related to each other in a concurrent telling of the disparate storylines.

The other thing about the structure/form of the narrative that fascinated me was the jarring proximity of the hard-boiled detective story kind of narration (complete with voice-over) and the fantastical elements of the story (Kevin's activities and then his ability to survive those same activities when they are enacted upon him by someone else) See? Not a complete spoiler there...

Then there was the pretty much entirely unrealistic storyline about Oldtown. I'm sorry, but I find it hard to believe that if women had complete control over prostitution, they would continue to engage in it. Aside from money, where might be the attraction in it? And if these women were so strong and powerful, would they not be able to invent other ways of using that to their (financial) advantage? Or are we to believe that the women of Oldtown are some subset of women who like walking around half naked - all the time - and being paid to have sex? Don't they ever just feel like being a little less Amazonian at times? Do they go to the grocery store like that? And since when did all hookers have such tight, perfect bodies? And skills? you know, like bow skills...

Maybe I'm just having problems with it, not so much because it is unrealistic, but because it just strikes me as another example of male fantasy, which, let's face it, drives the whole movie. The only reason anyone takes on corruption in Basin City is because they're horny for women (I don't count the prostitutes as taking on corruption since they've coopted it into their scheme of turned heads), not for some altruistic meaning. That's why the scene where Hardigan saves little 11 year old Nancy has to be the first in the movie, otherwise, after seeing all those other men go ga-ga over scantily clad women and embark on a killing spree, Hardigan's altruism 'an old man's life for a little girl's' just would get icky, looking like the pedophillic accusations that he is 'falsely' accused of in the narrative. After all, the relationship that starts so innocently ends up less so, particularly when he repeats his maxim, changing it to accomodate a grown-up, curvy, exotic dancer Nancy, 'an old man's life for a young woman's'.

And yes, I know that some of this has to do with the conventions of the genre - both comic/graphic novel and the detective story or vice and crime. Like I said, it made me think, stuck with me, got me thinking about other movies that do the same thing different ways or different things in the same way. Overall, money well spent.

While you're procrastinating doing something else

you might be amused at the folowing: bubble wrap (manic mode is particularly amusing) and an old but good joke updated and appearing particularly relevant these days.

(thanks to R for always sending me these great little bits of electronic amusement that perk up my day!)

Friday, April 22, 2005

I hurt

The first basketball game of the season took place yesterday.

In the sun.

Thursday, April 21, 2005

Today was a day for falling in love

No, I'm not looking at anyone in particular, and yes, I'm in love with my husband.

What I was thinking that today was one of those kind of days when you could fall in love with a new city. Yeah, I know I've lived here almost three years already, but it still feels like a new city - I suppose when you have your head stuck in books all day, it takes a bit longer to notice your surroundings.

The air was crisp but soft - not biting-crisp like winter (which always reminds me of my childhood) or the hazy, washed out heat of summer (like when we first arrived here in the middle of a heat wave), but a just-right temperature and clarity that made the colors of the Charles River absolutely vibrant. Crossing the river everytime I go into the city is one of the few things that make the hour and a half long trek worth it... and today it was worth every minute of it. I watched the downtown skyline go by above a brilliant blue river dotted with dazzlingly white sailboats and thought "Today is the kind of day that could make you fall in love with this place".

That is, you could fall in love with it if you were the kind of person who wasn't still stuck in some kind of pathological limbo state where you vacillate between missing the old place and worrying about having to move yet again before too long and not wanting to get attached to the current place if you've just got to leave anyway, dreading the idea of having to perhaps start all over again another time.

If you weren't that kind of person, today was the kind of day that could make you fall in love with a city like this one.

Better sleep solutions?

We're buying a new bed... not this moment (though I am bidding on a cool headboard on ebay and I'm wheening!), but very soon. Maybe a good night's sleep is what I really need... I think that the bed we have right now has been taken apart and moved too many times and is falling apart.

(It did make an awfully nasty noise at one point... so nasty, I found myself actually surpised that I wasn't lying on the floor!)

You know, there's some mattresses out there that cost more than my car's worth... but man are they comfy! We also looked at king size beds at one point... but they we measured out the space it would take in our room, and there really wasn't room for anything else if we did that! So we'll have to stick to something smaller for now - too bad - king size are downright luxurious to roll around in.

But since the computer crashed multiple times yesterday, it may come down to a choice between sleep (buying a bed) and work (buying a new computer)... yeah, yeah, I know which one I should choose!

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Vacation

I need a vacation. I'm so tired of working.

I've had two people in the same number of days tell me that I'm not looking or acting like myself lately.

And I know they're right. I feel like some kind of bizarre reading-machine that just takes in and takes in and takes in, compiling, and collecting little bits of information, collating them and filing them away into little corners where they'll likely be lost in a confusing mass of undifferentiated words and phrases all jumbling around in the back of my brain like the last apples in a barrel. And yet the stack of things to still be pumped into the reading-machine just keeps growing and growing because it seems almost impossible to pin down what is necessary and what isn't in the pile and I just keep reading and reading and wondering if it's really all worth while. After all, what really is it all for? It's not like I'm doing a degree in something useful, say, like, dentistry, where I know I'll come out with a job in the end.

Q: What do they call the guy who finishes last in dental school?
A: Dentist.

Can't say they same for all my studying - it all feels pretty futile.

Yesterday I managed to forget about being a student for a couple of hours, and it was like a weight came off my shoulders. I felt like a human being instead of a reading-machine, if just for a while. Wish I could get more of that.

Sunday, April 17, 2005

If you're a PhD student and were depressed by the earlier post...

...then you might not want to read this. Then again, it might cheer you up in ways that knowing depression is endemic to graduate school didn't.

Shades of cockroaches scurrying through my office come to mind as I read this article in the chronicle about office space in the humanities.

Saturday, April 16, 2005

At first its all "oohs" and "aahs" and then the running and screaming starts

Imagine my delight at seeing my husband bring my computer home last night from servicing and turning it on! It's alive!

Then imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth when it crashed only an hour into working with it this morning.

It's as if my computer has gone one better than virus, and has some kind of strange electronic cancer that just keeps metastasizing. I got rid of the last hard drive because it was supposed to have been the source of the problem, but it keeps coming back... like a cancer, or malaria... or ex-husbands...

(actually the last one was just a really bad dream... a sort of marital version of The Handmaid's Tale's reproductive dystopia where everyone was forced to stick with their first choice...)

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Not about me (for a change)

Oldest daughter is going to Honduras this summer, but sometimes I think I have to do just as much work to get her there as she does (I know this isn't true 'cause she's done some amazing things to have this opportunity, but it just sometimes feels like it). Biggest problem right now is getting her to the training tomorrow at the same time as another kid needs to be in another place... do all parents of more than one child eventually run into this problem? I'll figure it out, but it's annoying.

I'm also a little nervous (okay, sometimes, really nervous) about her going. My nervousness factor went WAY up when she handed me the list of current immunizations she should have. Yellow fever? Rabies vaccine? Yipes!

Why is it that I'm getting the willies when she doesn't seem to even notice? My guess is it's that sense of invicincibility all teenagers seem to have. Thing is, the older I get, the greater the number of times my body lets me down, and I start to realize how fragile it can be... even when I revel in its strength. I suppose when you're young, your body hasn't betrayed you often enough for you to start to distrust it. Hence, I'm the one who's not sleeping at night.

So, she's not totally sure what she'll be doing with the team - she's got the equivalent of two textbooks worth of stuff to read, so hopefully she'll know by the time she reads all of it (and before she gets there!). Sounds like a fabulous opportunity regardless of what she's working on. And I'm sure we'll see some significant changes in our daughter when she gets back at the end of the summer, just as we did after she came back from Colorado last summer.

But I still get a little nervous about it everytime I think about her going.

Hmmm...come to think of it, this entry really was about me anyway.

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Getting by...

Still don't know if it will be possible to resuscitate my computer.

Managed to rip a hole in my finger at school - how do you injure yourself doing English, anyway? And no, it's not a paper cut, it's a hole.

Good conversation with the supervisor for one of my comps areas - went just about how I expected, but not as bad as I dreaded... I think that's a good thing.

Newsflash to other NEU doctoral students reading! New comps proposals: 500-750 words.

That's TOTAL for all three areas.

Thank god! 'cause I'm not near as prolific as some people...
... well, at least as far as writing goes...

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Depressed

My computer is busted again. Obviously the problem last time wasn't the hard drive like IT guys said since a new hard drive is also having same problems as old one.

My sorrow knows no bounds.

Monday, April 04, 2005

CEA Conference

Getting to Indianapolis was a breeze - no delayed flights, and thanks to some careful planning (and the need for only 3 rather than 4 days of clothes) no bags to check and have opened during a security check.

(Okay, so I know these people are 'professionals' and all (I use that term loosely) but the idea of someone digging through my clothes and other personal items behind the scenes just creeps me out. If they gotta open my bag, I'd rather they did it at the security checkpoint where I can see them.)

My first thought as the bus started travelling from the airport into the city was that the place reminded me of a cross between Regina and Swift Current. The feeling faded a bit as I got closer to downtown, but the city never transcended that small-prairie-city feel that I first got from it.

I arrived before my roomate, so went to grab food but by the time I came back, she was there. We wrestled over who would get the bed by the window and I won... okay, not really, but if we had, I coulda taken her. She's a librarian, and as she confessed herself, a stereotypical librarian... though she did admit to me that if I ever want to find a man, I should go to geology conferences, 'cause the guys who attend those are all really manly-type men!

I headed out in the evening to explore, and by the time I'd done the walk along the river and the monument at the center of town, I realized I'd 'done' everything there was to do in Indianapolis! I suppose I could've gone to the zoo, but I've been to plenty of zoos, and the speedway didn't hold any real attraction for me, so the conference quickly became a working vacation. Setting my own schedule and not worrying about making food for other people, or getting up by a particular time (my presentation was in the afternoon) was fabulous! And after the hostel in San Diego, the hotel was luxurious - there were bathrobes, nintendo, snack trays, and all the little shampoo bottles and soaps you could ever desire!

The best part of all was seeing a colleague who I haven't seen for a couple of years and catching up on (and catching her up on) all the 'news' that's happened in the meantime. We had a great time at dinner and then lunch the next day and meeting her made my weekend!

Some sessions were really great, and one of them got me thinking about ways to organize one of my reading lists (a persistent monkey-on-my-back kind of problem) which really psyched me, though there were two that creeped me out: the session on the female figure in Victorian poetry that was all given by men old enough to look like they were Victorians themselves, and the session of Vonnegut where I was the only female in the room (and one panelist introduced himself to every other man in the room, but not to me). Are there no other women who like Vonnegut?

After all, I already like Dick!

Glad I'm not alone

Depressed doctoral students? Naaaaah, you must be dreaming!

This article in the Chronicle doesn't surprise me in the least... in fact, it consoles me to read that in a study of 3100 graduate students 67 percent reported feeling hopeless at times, 95 percent felt overwhelmed in graduate school, and 54 percent said they had felt so "depressed that it was difficult to function."

Hell, it's comforting to know that I'm normal!

Sunday, April 03, 2005

Ouch!

Everything I have to do over the next month (plus all the things I should've done over the last two weeks but didn't 'cause I was flying all over the place) came crashing down on my head... literally... this morning. I took one look at my desk and realized that a) there's a lot of stuff on it, and b) all that stuff needs to be read, noted, filed, annotated, or otherwise dealt with in a painful manner.

Ugh!

On a cheerier note, I woke up to my children quoting Eddie Izzard 'Bunch of flowers' and 'Areyouhappywithyourwash?', which made me glad to be home.

Guess it really is all about the good together with the bad.

Saturday, April 02, 2005

Technology is insidious

I just got sidetracked from what I should be doing by thinking about all the technological gadgets and inventions that I now feel like I couldn't do without, though I do remember a time before they existed.

I was reading a book where a reference was made to a novel that reminded me of a film. Now the problem was, I couldn't remember the name of the film (I have a mind like a sieve sometimes - this particular tidbit must've fallen through and got swept out with the trash).

I also knew I should be able to remember it but spent ten minutes digging around in my brain trying to find it. I could however remember one of the actors - not his name, but the fact that he was also in lots of other movies. So I went to imdb.com and looked up one of the movies I remember him being in, then linked through the cast list to his filmography, and then from there found the title of the movies I was looking for. Of course, once I saw it, I 'remembered' the title.

I would have been hard pressed to fill in that gap in my memory without the internet and readily accessible and cross-referenced information like that.

It made me remember all the other times I've said 'How did I manage without this before?' Microwave ovens (for heating baby bottles quickly while a child is wailing), VCRs (and now DVD players) for re-viewing movies (with pause features to stop and make notes), cell phones (try going without one for a while - hard to find payphones these days) just to name a few. There are plenty of other things I enjoy but can imagine doing without, but these ones definitely make my life more convenient.

But what would I do without them? Without the internet, I would've had to go to a library to look that information (and being inherently lazy, might not have done so!), without a microwave, you have to use water in a pot on the stove (and I've done it - it takes what seems like forever when you've got a hungry kid), without a VCR, I would have to rely on memory (or multiple trips to the theatre) to write film criticism, and without a cell phone, I'd have to find a payphone (and only call people who were at home or work with phones nearby), or plan ahead and hope nothing changes in the meantime.

Does this technology actually make my life better? Or does it just allow me to be lazier and less organized?

My guess is the latter. In that case, it might not actually be a good thing...