Freedom to Read

Freedom To Read deals with the issue of censorship in Canada. UGoo will be hosting its own celebration/awareness of Freedom to Read Week on March 1st in the MacLaughlin Library. Should be pretty interesting--they have some of the banned books on display in the library and it's really interesting to see what has been called into question in the past, and what is called into question today. Many of my favourites are there--To Kill A Mockingbird, The Diviners, The Handmaid's Tale (never challenged in Canada, but #37 of the 100 most challenged books in the US, according to the ALA), The Wars, the Harry Potter books, On the Banks of Plum Creek...

They're even encouraging people to read and release banned books through Bookcrossing. It really doesn't get much better than that.

online books

Black Mask . Com.

Could be quite fruitful, I think.

I never tried to grow flowers in the desert

It has been a while, hasn't it? Reading week was busier than I intended it to be; at the same time I feel like I've accomplished very little. potentially because I have, in fact, accomplished virtually nothing. Nonetheless, I am slogging on with my work today, and have 3/4 finished my paper proposal that's due Tuesday morning...though the hard part will still be the tentative Works Cited list, as it will have probably close to 25 books on it. Which, for a ten to twelve pager, is a pretty sizable list.

I still have to write my response to Janice Radway and her Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, but that has been burbling in my mind for some time, so I'm hoping that will go will. It's for my theory class on Reader Oriented Theory, if you're wondering, but I did an excerpt of it last year in my Intro to Theory class.

I do actually have more to post, but I should return my work, and make my way back here later on.

really good conversations I have had lately, part I:

"cut me STRAIGHT to the HEART, now we're getting someWHERRRRRE..."
"This is such a good song."
"Bring it BACK to the START."
"Now we're getting somewhere!"
"When I'm with YOU, I don't CARE where it is I'm falling..."
"This song should be--"
"--on Recurring Dream. Yeah, totally."
"It just doesn't make sense--"
"--that it isn't. Although, Chocolate Cake charted in Canada, and it's not on there either."
"What would you take off of Recurring Dream to fit both of those songs on there?"
"Oh. Good question."
"Not the Girl You Think You Are" (simultaneously)
"That's only one song, though."
"Well, I didn't say Chocolate Cake needed to be on there. I just said that it charted. Actually, it was one of only four CH singles to chart commercially in Canada. So in the conceptualization of the "greatest hits" album, it..."
[smack. silence.]
"So...no Chocolate Cake, then?"

off to...never never land?

WAtching MMM's "Listed" which is doing the 40 best albums of the last 25 years. Quite interesting really, inasmuch that I think I have owned two albums between 18-40. Ah well. There are worse things than being perpetually out of step.

The craziness continues on this end; I am definitely thrilled that reading week is next week, but less than thrilled about the amount of work I have left to do before this term is finished. Bleh.

I talked to a friend a few days ago about a paper he has to write for his first year English course at another university. It's a research paper, and he wants to write on Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". "Do you," he asked, an earnest anxiety in his voice, "think there will be a lot of critical stuff on the poem?" Heh. He also wants to talk his prof into letting him right on "The Waste Land" instead, even though they are not studying it. It's just madness.

I've started using TRillian for all my messaging needs. Such a great little program it is. One of the options is that it links to Wikipedia within the context of your messages (ie, certain words will be underlined, and if you move the cursor over them you get a small window with the Wikipedia entry). It's a bit like having The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on your computer.

Speaking of which, has anyone heard anything new about the movie version?

Introducing Finn

Introducing Finn 

Everyone, this is Finn, the newest member of Castle Skylark. His plant is named Tim. He's actually a much more blue colour than this picture indicates, but he is really fun. And his name is Finn.

I've got the urge for going

Urgh. Just as my sister learns to budget her time better, I completely forget...thankfully I've done so much "how to write an essay" teaching this term I could probably do it drunk and half asleep. I am the latter today, but not the former.

Venturing up north this weekend. Updates may be sporadic (read: non-existent) until Monday. Of course, now that I've said that, you'll probably get lots. Or something.

Sock monkeys are totally the new Build-A-Bear. Which, ironically, is where I'm going today. Go figure.

knitting is so bad for the wallet

I bought a whole bunch of really fun Icelandic wool at a Lens Mill. So pretty, so exciting...it's a bit off the beaten track, so I went with an appropriately vehicled friend, and the two of us were just in awe. They have a lot of other crafting notions as well; some days I become quite aware of the fact that I am very much my mother's daughter.

Not much else is new and/or exciting. It's a long day here at school on Wednesday; none of my books are in at the library yet (perhaps tomorrow, if I am lucky?) It is a snowy winter wonderland here in Guelph right now.

I'm tired and I'm sad and I just wish school was over.

past the second post

Back from the weirdness that is Pilates, now. I actually like the exercise and the class and all, but there is just something about "rolling like a ball" that is just plain weird--though I love the way it makes my back feel.

I'm currently in the process of my intial forays into two new projects. The first is my final paper for Lit and Anthropology, which I could take in a number of different directions. One is to look at EJ Pratt's Brebeuf and his Brethren (that's Trent University's annotated version of the text...it's a long, epic poem) and look at how Pratt turns the ethnographic into the literary. Another appraoch might be to take the ethnographic (specifically the Jesuit Relations) and look at how it becomes literary commodity in both the seventeenth century and today. Or maybe something about Angela Carter? (I'm just kidding about that one. Mostly.)

Project the Second is about the relationship between weblogging and autobiography. I have a partner in crime of sorts for this one (or at the very least a sounding board) in one of my classmates, who is working on theorizing hypertext. Oh, the madness that will come from our geekdom.

I wait in 4/4 time...

I've been listening to a lot of The Weakerthans as of late. The sparsity of their music, grounded as it is in what I'll prosaicly call "post-punk" has been striking the right chord with me lately...the right chord of January's desolation. Except that now it's February, and I'm not sure where that leaves me.

You know, there's that scene in Apocalypse Now where Dennis Hopper is talking to Martin Sheen about Col. Kurtz and says, "He's a poet-warrior in the classic sense." I really like that. I like that a lot. Especially in light of John K. Sampson's lyrics. I think what has been so appealing to me about The Weakerthan's music is that their lyrics are so grounded in Winnipeg--they have this weird, almost symbiotic relationship with the city. Left and Leaving, in particular, is just gorgeous. It's a love/hate letter, a myriadic reflection of what it is to be from Winnipeg...and, arguably, what it means to be from Canada.

My city's still breathing (but barely it's true) through buildings gone missing like teeth. The sidewalks are watching me think about you, all sparkled with broken glass. I'm back with scars to show. Back with the streets I know. They never take me anywhere but here.

--The Weakerthans, Left and Leaving

If I ever wind up teaching Canadian lit, I want to teach this. I'll post more about other goings on later--right now now I just want to think about this.

ah, it's not my conscience that begs to be untrue...

What a long week. I keep having to remind myself that it isn't over, as I have to teach tomorrow morning...but for some reason I feel even more exhausted when I think about that. Bleh. We're doing Poe's The Purloined Letter, which I am honestly not a huge fan of...to the point where I've just said "screw it" to the lesson planning and will simply make something up tomorrow on the bus ride to the school.

It is gloriously warm here in Guelph; I am loving this southern Ontario winter thing. It's going to kill me to move back to North Bay Rock City in the fall, if I do.

I have spent a good portion of the evening pondering a House Committee on UnCanadian Activities; I find myself wondering who would chair it, who would be on it, and whom it would be investigating. Deborah Grey could chair...with Jack Granatstein riding shotgun. Certainly my loathing of The Tragically Hip would make me suspicious...

It makes me want to read The Crucible again.

I've got more to say than you but I'm not sure what that proves

Design of this munificence deserves a far better entry than the one below, so here goes:
+drinking at the Pennywhistle is clearly better than doing your homework
+drinking Strongbow at the Pennywhistle is even better than that
+I'm quite happy to be a lit student and not an anthropologist
+gossip is fun
+sometimes being a clueless lit student in a theatre class can be worthwhile
+I still like theory
+I need to start checking my pockets before I do the laundry thing
+Reading week D&D is going to be kick-ass
+get to watch Lost in Translation tomorrow night, and go grocery shopping. I have such a rich life.

the starlight rules

Ms. Starlight gets mad props (as the kids say) for the layout. I love it, I love it, I love it.

sun shiny day

Say what you will about the Norton Anthology of English Literature (and Norton in general)--in fact most of it needs to be said--but their online companion to NAEL is just lovely.

Have started playing Baldur's Gate II; is infinitely preferable to a) my own reading, and b) my marking. This is either good, or bad.

Likely the latter.

Query

Query: Would it be evil of me to mark papers using a D100?

For those of you not in the D&D loop, a D100 should be, theoretically, a hundred-sided die. Mine, however, is much more practical/clever: it's a large, clear plastic D10 that has a smaller, opaque D10 inside, so when you roll it, you read the 10s column number off the clear dice, and the 1s column off the coloured dice. It's actually really fun. And sadly, I am not actually marking papers that way...

a wink's as good as a nod

This marks the 5th or 6th time I've tried to update in the last few days, all of which have been abandoned, forgotten, or eaten by my computer. (Predominantly the latter.)

So. Things I will not be posting about include my dad's reviews of the books the sisters wrote as children, marking, teaching, my life in general.

My enjoyment of tea is increasingly greatly this term, as I find myself drinking amounts that are starting to border on the ridiculous--let's just say that if coffee was my hot beverage poison of choice, I'd be absolutely manic, rail thin, and would not have slept in the past two weeks. Actually, you know what's crazy? i find myself occasionally craving coffee now. I hate the way it tastes (and I know that I hate the way it tastes), but I find myself wanting it--same with beer, actually.

I went to an art auction for the Guelph Jazz festival earlier this week, and it was really fun. The food was fabulous (if a bit sparing, but then, I got there late) and the art was as well. It was interesting to see the 'who's who' of the Guelph arts community, in a lot of ways. It was also fun because it was a dressy occasion, and my silk skirt has so few occasions that it can bring itself out for. Sadly, however, a dressed-to-the-nines Rhi means that all of her classmates in attendance won't recognize her.

Lots of reading this weekend, none of which I have any real desire to do. I know plays aren't long, but I just can't bring myself to care too much. And I should care--I have a response paper due this week on that reading.

I'm really hoping next week will be better--I need to cheer up a bit.

you're sure? better be...Gryffindor!

It's rather a wonderful thing to find yourself falling in love with your new school and city, and actually being disappointed that you only have another seven months to spend there. The UGoo sports teams are the Guelph Gryphons, and our school colours are gold, scarlet, and black--is it any wonder that sometimes I secretly pretend that I am a student at Hogwarts? (Of course, technically I'm a Ravenclaw, but a girl can dream, can't she?)

The sock minkey obsession rages on through various parts of Ontario. I have made two monkeys (with the help of my lovely baby sister) and a socktopus so far; it's really interesting to see how quickly they develop their own characters...although perhaps that is simply my silly, overactive imagination. The socktopus, in particular, who is destined to control the sock minkey army my family is slowly building (even mon pere is involved), has developed a very dictatorial style and several vicious attack strategies. As the Squidge says, this is what you get for naming him General Socktopus. Alfred, my other minkey, is fun too--he's made from a very small set of socks, and has a correspondingly very sweet disposition, and doesn't mind when I forget that he's on the chair and sit on him.

School is soldiering on at the moment. Am not too panicked yet as am trying to save that for a future date (current prediction for this will be in a couple of weeks).

Surviving January...

And the weeks unfold, slowly but surely, and i am starting to do better with stuff like not making all of my assignments due at the end of the term. It's awesome. Sort of. Interesting observation for the week: The majority of the profs I have encountered this year are extreme Type A personalities. (Which I can respect, having parent(s) who could fall into that category, and, dare I say it, potentially exhibiting some of those tendencies myself. A lot.)

You should really hop on over to Knot Again and see what I made tonight. It's awesome. A sock minkey army couldn't hold me back.

I bought the first Thursday Next book today. It makes me--thus far--very, very happy. I also got a Galileo thermometre. They're so pretty.

plastic daffodils

Argh. Nothing is more frustrating than when your best laid plans are upset by the sudden onset of sickness (and also when your mother neglects to send your bathing suit via the mail). Insomuch that tonight is my first swimming lesson, I'm going to suck it up and go, but I think I will have to forgo what I have termed "Monday Night Club" and just pack myself into bed early. Sore throats are the pits.

The weekend was uneventful, in ways both good (restful) and bad (unproductive).

The Canadian Legends people sent me a very nice email thanking me for the link to their website. Lets hope they are still nice once Campaign Brebeuf gets underway.

there is profit in the love of hate

I taught today for the first time. No. I didn't actually teach for the first time. I taught literature today for the first time, and it was the most wonderful, most glorious thing.

We discussed what would make up the 5 Most Influential Works in English Literature, intertextuality, poetry, and gender and sexuality. It was marvelous. One of the poems that was discussed was William Carlos Williams' Red Wheel Barrow, and one of the students had it on her in an anthology, so I wrote it in the board, and we talked a little about why it was neat. After class, she came up to me and said that our discussion had convinced her to keep the anthology, which apparently she was going to sell to the bookstore.

Lots of reading this weekend, including some academic work by Robertson Davies for my Politic of the Cross-Dressed Body class, on boys in Elizabethan theatre. I also get to review Twelfth Night...skippy.

Yay, refund mon-ay from the school. I am no longer broke.