Oh my god!

Last week, I have to admit, I thought it was a little slow. Although, I have to admit, I had read the spoiler page on lostpedia so I knew what was going to happen. This week? Wow. I mean, wow! Amazing! Best episode I've seen in a while.

Ok, now I have to get to work. This thesis isn't writing itself.

Guilt

is a powerful motivator. After staying up a bit too late with someone who had to work this morning, poor dear, I decided to stay up this morning. The other day I went to sleep at 9 a.m. Today, I got up then. I am just starting to work on my thesis now, but it's 1 pm, not 10 pm. I've had my coffee, I've read the paper, I've paid bills. I have also solved a mystery that caused a bit of yuckiness last night. At least, I'm pretty sure. I was beginning to think I was crazy.

Omg, I can't start working yet! I have to watch Lost! I can post-it while that's on. I can't believe I forgot! I could have watched it already! There are too many exclamation points in this paragraph!! And it's a Desmond episode! Awesome.

Except

there's been a change of plan. :)

I'm not getting any work done anyway.

It's cold

and I'm completely unmotivated. I'm allowed to stay in tonight, I give myself permission. I am making the decision to stay in. Going out would be ridiculous. I did not get an extension so that I could procrastinate. That being said, I have a splitting headache, so I need to do something that requires less thought than reading theory or developing my analysis. Maybe I'll go to bed before dawn tonight.

This is me breathing

a sigh of relief. Not only did my adviser give me until Monday, she said I could turn it in next Friday if I needed that long. I haven't responded to the second email yet, since I'm not sure if I really want to take that long, and because if I take that long it will need to be even more brilliant, but it's nice to now I can take that long, and let's face it I probably will.

I didn't get as much done with PF as I wanted to yesterday, and I purposefully didn't drink coffee after midnight so that I couldn't sleep when I went to bed at 8am again like the night before, but I did get probably fifty pages closely read and post-it'ed or noted on my computer. I also took Cat's Cradle to bed with me at 5:30 and post-it'ed over half of it, flagging mentions of Bokononism in yellow and ice-nine in blue, before turning off the light at 7am. One of these days I will go to bed before the sun comes up and get up before it is setting. It's winter - the days are short.

Today I was going to do a quick (quick, ha!) rewrite of the last short story I completed, which I haven't worked on in a while, to send in for the fiction contest for the literary seminar I'm going to in St. Petersburg this summer. The deadline is tomorrow. I could send it as is, but it's not good. It's amazing that I haven't been writing creatively for a long time, other than notes on cocktail napkins or snippets in the back of my class notebooks, and that reading the first paragraph was painful. It's just not as good as I know I could write now, which is weird because I haven't been writing (fiction). I think there's too much work to be done on it to get done in the next hour, however, so I'm just going to skip it. I already have a tuition scholarship of 20% from the contest for last year (I deferred admission), and I can't send in something I don't fully endorse as the best work I can do. For some reason, I haven't thought about my thesis in that way, and I need to... Just thought of that.

The reason I'm leaving in an hour, incidentally, is that our temporary roommate is leaving tomorrow for good, going back to middle America, so we're going to dinner and then painting the town a bit. For old times' sake. Not that we need an excuse.

I haven't heard

back yet, but I emailed my adviser and asked for a few days extension on the draft. I have no other choice, it's not a paper yet. If I was only writing a 20-page paper on Pale Fire, it wouldn't be a paper in time. I'm making a lot of progress though. I've got post-its in the first third of PF, and I'd written extensive notes (in the form of paragraphs, really) on the poem section the day before. Today, I'm just going to keep on going.

I stayed up until 8am this morning, but then I couldn't sleep until 9 or so. I almost got back up to keep working, but my eyes were too tired. My brain wouldn't shut off. And then I woke up at 11, and then I slept through my alarm at noon, and I finally got up around 4pm. Which means what? I'm officially nocturnal? Something must be done about this.

First on the agenda: coffee.

I'm making dinner

and then I'm going to sit here with some classical music and get down to business.

I was starting to worry last night as I was going through Pale Fire because I started to wonder if the trend I thought I saw didn't pertain to the poem, only Kinbote's commentary, which wouldn't be good. I'd have to alter my entire line of inquiry if the catastrophic event in question (Hazel's death is what I'm focusing on in the poem) didn't pervade the poem from start to finish. But as I was walking back to the subway after doing a little necessary shopping, I realized (aha!) that the image that opens the poem is a reversal of Hazel's death. The lines are (to refresh our memories):

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane; (33).

Keeping in mind what Kinbote says ("our shadows still walk without us," 15), but not putting too much emphasis on it because we must never forget that Kinbote's commentary was written after Shade's death and thus after the composition of the poem as it is presented to him, Shade says he is the shadow, meaning he is the one remaining after the death of another. The windowpane mirrors the frozen surface of the lake, but in this instance the solid plane is intact, which causes the death of the bird, where in Hazel's case, the plane of the lake is not solid, which is what causes her death. There's also something here about the false azure reflected in the window and potentially reflected by the surface of the lake, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

It's really down to the wire. Time to break out the post-its and do this. You know what I'm talking about, L. The Waffle House and our Norton Anthologies. Good times, good times.

Other than coffee

and dinner and a cigarette and a brief break (while eating a snack) to watch Cashmere Mafia (a guilty pleasure which I allow myself because my friend has a recurring role as a waiter and last week I watched him walk by in the background), I have been sitting in my room, at this computer, since 3pm. That's a long time. I've gotten a lot done, I think, though it's totally the tip of the iceberg. I really think I could have written my whole thesis on Pale Fire, but I think I can see the logic behind not having done that. My logic, of course, was that was what my adviser suggested and I respect her opinion. Her logic, I think, okay, really I'm not sure. But I think it will look better in the long run, it's certainly more challenging, and that's probably what it comes down to - my thesis should show my versatility and all that, huh?

I'm so fried at the moment, I can't even form a sentence. Tomorrow I have to run into town to run an errand, and it's my friend's birthday so I should go to dinner with my friends in Queens, but I know they'll understand if I don't go. I'm finally focused, I need to keep it that way. If I actually get this done (I'll have something to give her, I'm not worried about that, really - okay, yes I am, I'm totally freaking out about it) by Thursday, I am going to treat myself so big Thursday night. As if I don't spoil myself rotten all of the time. ;)

I did very little

yesterday in terms of my thesis. I read about half of a Derrida essay at the laundromat, and for some reason that seemed to be enough, I suppose, because I then let it be known that I was thinking of going out, at which my temporary roommate (who is leaving New York on Thursday) suggested going dancing, at which I said, "well, go get ready." Our usual dancing haunt was annoying me - I just don't understand why people feel they can overtake your space just by putting themselves there when you're clearly trying to dance in that spot already - and my friend got both of our drinks spilled on her while I was outside on the phone, and she hadn't been to the Bulgarian bar I've told her about, so we headed down to the Lower East Side with my whatever- you- want- to- call- him, where we proceeded to dance salsa to any song that allowed it and every which way to everything else.

Which means that for the next three days, eighteen hours, twenty-eight minutes and fifty seconds, give or take, I will be locked in my room, glued to this chair, except for coffee refills in the kitchen.

It's just the first draft, it's just the first draft, it's just the first draft.

Yeah, except she's expecting it to be fairly polished. *deep breath* I have been training for this. No sweat.

In the last ten hours

I've managed to throw together all of my notes for Pale Fire. It's something. I also found yet another article. I don't know which is worse: the sheer volume of criticism surrounding Pale Fire, or the complete lack of scholarly attention to We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Cat's Cradle has a lot of criticism surrounding it as well, of course, but not as much as Nabokov, I think. Maybe I just haven't looked as hard. Anyway, the article I found tonight is from 1985, so I was sort of hoping it would be irrelevant, but it turns out it's all about Hazel, which makes it potentially very relevant. For the section on Pale Fire, I have decided (a bit more than tentatively at this point) to write about the representation of two catastrophes: Hazel's suicide (as narrated by her father, John Shade, in the poem) and John Shade's murder (as narrated by Charles Kinbote in the commentary). These seem to me to be the most traumatic events in the text, but as such they've garnered a considerable amount of attention, though not necessarily (though partially) from the angle I'm taking.

I should probably read Freud...

I'm reading Memoires for Paul de Man by Jacques Derrida at the moment. Bottom line is that I can always concentrate on my close reading for this draft and work in some theory for the next go round, right?

I'm panicking. I'm starting to panic. It's 5:30 in the morning and I'm starting to freak out. I will be fine. I'm going to go attempt to turn my brain off now, and then I will attempt to get up at a reasonable hour. I set my alarm this morning, but it was so darn loud I was more concerned with turning it off than getting out of bed. No wait, that was yesterday. This morning was rather fabulous. It snowed a ton last night, I love it. I'm such a little kid when it comes to snow. I was out in the city with friends and just standing outside, letting the flakes cover my hair and eyelashes and coat.

We had this very strange conversation last night, which I sort of stumbled into the middle of so I don't know what started it, about making a language an official language and dictating language, the legality of one language over another, reclaiming some sort of pre-colonial past, what having a thriving literature means for a language, what colonizers killing off all the intelligentsia does to a language, living vs. may as well be dead languages, that sort of thing. Hegemony. I, of everyone at the table, had very little room to talk. My Spanish sucks, my French sucks, my German sucks, and the only thing I know how to say in Polish is "May I have an ashtray, please?" What can ya do?

shit

Five days, fifteen hours, thirty-three minutes, 43 seconds. Give or take.

Seven days

and counting. I'm going to read in bed until my eyes won't stay open. Shouldn't be too long, actually. The stress does not make for a long attention span. Tomorrow I will be doing laundry, which means just me and a book for an hour or so, which is good. And I went to the grocery today, so I have plenty of brain food to last me through the weekend. Will I be able to resist my party instinct? Probably not all weekend, but all work and no play wouldn't be good for the stress level either.

Did everyone see the total lunar eclipse tonight? Luckily, it was clear here in New York City (it was supposed to have snowed), so we all got to see it - well, those of us that wanted to. I am in awe of something that can make so many people stare up at the sky in wonder. We all turn to children in a good way. Incidentally, the yellowish spot to the left of the darkened moon was Saturn, and the bluish one to the left was the star Regulus in the constellation Leo. Gotta love it.

It was a day

away from my computer. Away from my apartment. It was lovely. That's not entirely true - the former two, not the latter. It was incredibly lovely, but I didn't leave here until 8pm. I returned eight (8!) library books, went to dinner at one of my favorite sushi restaurants in the city (none of them quite measure up to my favorite, go figure - S, P, and A aren't here), just me and a book, followed by a couple glasses of rioja at a coffee house near campus. Then I met up with my guy. That's all you're getting.

The book I was reading was Death of a Discipline by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, which I read last spring for a class and which is completely brilliant. Every word is important. It's very inspiring, even if I don't think I can use it in my thesis necessarily.

Today I have some essays to read and then some Derrida to start going through. And maybe some writing too, we'll see. I've already spent far too much time goofing off though, I'll tell you that.

I have to say

I actually got quite a bit of work done last night. I still have a lot of work to do, of course, but I'm getting there. I have six or seven books in my to-library bag, with at least one more to add to the collection after a few more pages. I also did some writing on PF (730 words), which is good because it's the one I have the fewest of my own words on paper for. I'm sure I'll add to that today while I'm reading. It's important to write things down as soon as I think about them (seems obvious, but it's easy to forget), instead of telling myself I'll remember things later. I won't.

I was going to start working earlier, but I wanted to read about what's going on in Kosovo. The wording in some of the quotes is ...interesting. Do I go on a little rant? I don't know if I want to. Given the subject matter of the books I've been reading (cultural paranoia, apocalyptic temper, inevitability, etc.), and the historical example of rapidly escalating bifurcation into opposing sides over a relatively small-scale event, I don't want to come off as pessimistic. It's not that I don't think there is inherently something wrong with Kosovo being an independent nation, especially given recent history. What concerns me, moving beyond the region, is something we talked about in my intro to international relations class or whatever it was called way back when: unilaterally declaring independence usually results in going unrecognized by the international community because if we (whoever "we" are) recognize one, we'd have to recognize more than one, and who gets to make that decision - who deserves self-rule and who doesn't? The answer may seem fairly obvious - the richest and/or most powerful nation-states - but as the example of Kosovo makes perfectly clear, "we" do not always speak as a group.

And another thing: How does Kosovo not set a precedent? I fully understand that saying “Kosovo cannot be seen as a precedent for any other situation in the world today,” (Condoleeza Rice) is a warning - not necessarily just to Russia-backed movements in Georgia - but to other regions aspiring to self-rule, but even given the legal definition of the term 'precedent,' that a past action justifies whatever it is the justifier is trying to do, the word 'precedent' simply means something that has happened in the past, something that precedes. The fact that it 'cannot be seen' is completely nonsensical. Of course it can be seen and will be seen as a precedent or as an example, whether positively or negatively from one angle or another.

If this event doesn't result in violence, hopefully it does set a precedent. There are so many secessionist movements around the world that inflict daily violence on their communities, I just... I don't understand why violence is preferable to non-violence. I just don't. And I never will.

Somehow I managed

to see everyone on my list last night.

And now I have work to do.

Some of my friends are also writing their theses right now, so it was good to talk to them about where they are, etc. Two of us have the same adviser, and we are the only ones with deadlines so soon - we're the only ones with deadlines, period, other than the final one, and we have three deadlines with our adviser - but I'm actually glad because otherwise I wouldn't feel so pressured, and I need the anxiety to spur me to action.

So I've checked all of my daily websites and whatever - oh, almost, I forgot a few. Okay, done. Postsecret is pretty fabulous. As always. I had actually looked at that one earlier and had forgotten other ones I'm not going to mention.

10 days. Yikes.

There is such a thing

as too much of a social life. I'm not going to complain. There are far worse things, yes?

Today I'm going to read a book (online) called Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History by Michael André Bernstein, which I've been meaning to read for months and just haven't. It was written sort of in partnership with another book, called Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time by Gary Saul Morson, which I also intend to read.

I have roughly four hours before I have to get ready, though if I've picked out an outfit by the time it's time to get dressed, that will give me another half hour. But I also have to eat dinner before I go if we're not going for dinner, which I haven't decided yet. Call me crazy, but the stress of figuring out how I'm going to get this thesis completed in 11 days is not inspiring me to want a fancy schmancy dinner party kind of deal. Nothing against my friend who is leaving, who I adore. Playing it by ear, as always.

Update: I forgot my school friends are hanging out on Saturdays now too, which means I just got another invite. That's three places I'm supposed to be at 10 o'clock...

I've just

spent the entire day goofing off. Why is it that now, at 2am, I feel a little bit motivated? Do I stay up and read? I could drag some Derrida into bed with some post-its and see what happens. This is a wild Friday night, I tell ya.

My day has consisted, I'm not kidding, in sitting in front of my computer and reading. Yet not a word of it was pertinent to the project I have to turn in twelve days from now. I had a bit of a headache. And I had to watch the latest installment of Lost in HD streaming on ABC.com. I'm an addict, I admit it.

I just gathered all of the notes I've written into one document, most of my musings on my thesis other than what I've written here, and it added up to about 7000 words. That makes me feel a little better, I'm not going to lie. Even if I know that's not nearly enough.

My shoulder hurts from sitting with my fingers perched on these keys all day, on the touchpad, hunched over reading the screen, squinting because my eyes are dry. I can do this, right?

I could brag

but I won't. For a holiday that promises to disappoint, I had such a good time. He's the best kind of distraction, I'll say that.

Anyway, I need to get some work done today. I wrote about 937 words yesterday about WHALITC, just rough ramblings, but I'm sure I can expand that. My brain hurts today, and my attention span is next to nothing, but I have to do something or else I'll feel so incredibly guilty. I only have twelve and a half days, and I sort of need to get it done a day before that because one of my best friends is leaving the same day, so there must be one last night of carousing, right? As if I want to think about carousing after the various elixirs I consumed last night.

Sometimes, I swear, I just don't want to look at words. Do I need a break? Define need.

Happy Valentine's Day!

That's right, it's time once again for the holiday that makes everyone miserable. So why am I in such a good mood? Not telling. :)

Today the idea is to write for as long as I can manage it. Where do I begin, though? Do I start where I left off with one of my other rants? Do I brainstorm about the use of ineffective magic in We Have Always Lived in the Castle? Do I discuss the embracing of Bokononism in Cat's Cradle? Do I delve into the superimposition of the Gradus narrative on the final days of Shade's life in Pale Fire? Do I piece together what I have from my notes amid the quotes I pulled from various books? Do I read some theory? I don't know. Which is why I started here, I suppose.

Going back to the substance of my questions, I've been thinking about this, and I don't want to discuss religious elements of two of the three, specifically because there aren't any religious elements in - no, that's the wrong way to word it: there are spiritual elements in PF, there is contemplation of the afterlife, there is a haunting. But there isn't necessarily a system of belief. Okay, maybe there is, on the part of the poem at the very least, but I don't want to talk about religion the whole time. I'm not interested in the religious aspects in and of themselves, but how they are indicative of a way of thinking about the past, a way of organizing that past, a way of ordering, simplifying, reducing. But I also want to talk about Merricat's representation of the past as limited or unlimited, as interrupted by these catastrophic events, as marked by regularly scheduled stressful encounters like going into the village or outsiders coming to tea. But then am I talking about too many things? I just need to write.

When I started what I called my close reading of We Have Always..., I started going through the text line by line, writing down every instance of "always," "never," and any other marker of temporality. I have nine pages of notes for 37 pages of text. To continue in this vein seems to me to be rather time consuming. And, really, what am I getting at there? I don't need to document every instance of temporal confusion in the novel, I don't have space for that kind of discussion in my thesis, even if this was the only novel I was writing about.

Incidentally, I had the weirdest dream this morning. It was very confused, a ridiculous amount of different interactions and scenarios happening all at once, I was being turned in a million different directions, and every time I thought I had resolved something - found what or who I was looking for, diffused a confrontation of some kind - something completely different presented itself. My adviser was there, and I think she was waiting on our table or something, and we (I don't remember who the female friend was, but there was a male friend as well, and my parents may have been there too, I don't really remember) were at a sort of biergarten type place, with strangers across from us at these picnic table looking things, and there was like a flight of beers, but they were all imperial pints, and my adviser pulled our tray before we were done, so the female friend to my left got mad and said, well, I'm just going to take the next peoples order, because she had been trying to order something and my adviser had ignored her, like she was trying to rush us out of there, turn and burn style, but what the next people had ordered were like strawberry milkshakes. It was very weird. Convoluted. I was also studying with a friend at one point, trying to find a bar open long enough to use their bathroom, and it was all sort of in a mall-type complex. Who knows. I may have a lot on my plate.

Back to my thesis: I need to keep reminding myself of my focus, which is the ordering of the past, the patterning of the past, around catastrophic events in such a way that super-imposes teleology. My point, of course, is that causality is something that can only be imposed after the fact - events as they have already happened only have a known result because the result has already happened. Is that tautological? Perhaps it is the way that I've just worded it. I think I know what I'm trying to say, but I haven't gotten to the point where I'm effectively saying it. And the only way to do that is to put it in writing. Let's do this.

and today

I'm anxiety-ridden. Time to get to work.

quelle nuit

Last night, after putting four (count 'em, four) books in my to-library bag, I got the itch to get out of the apartment, but I didn't have any takers, and it was absolutely freezing outside and the heat had just come on inside, so we as a household decided to watch Shaun of the Dead since I'd never seen it before. I as an antsy crazy person decided to accompany that with a glass of bourbon and proceeded to get tipsy off the first of probably four (count 'em, four) of those monstrosities.


Which means I didn't get much reading done today. I knew my attention span would be next to nil, so I as a wise and experienced person decided to websurf and study Spanish a bit while my roommate popped in Calendar Girls since she'd never seen it before. And now we as irresponsible young women have decided to go out on the icy town and thereafter down no less than four (count 'em, four) pints of whatever beer strikes our fancy. Awesome.

yesterday

I finally watched Hot Fuzz for the first of what I'm sure will be a thousand times. Why I didn't listen to my roommate months ago, I have no idea. Hilarious! Absolutely brilliant. Completely heteronormative, but satiric enough to pull it off in some sense. (If you don't want to hear anything about it, don't read the third paragraph. I wouldn't want to inadvertently spoil it for anyone. See my note, paragraph three, concerning the impossibility of spoiling it, though.)

And speaking of referring to anything that deviates from legally or religiously committed heterosexual unions as deviant, I also managed to keep reading Brian McHale's Postmodernist Fiction. Which on the whole is pretty brilliant as well. Especially considering it was written in 1987, not that that is so long ago academically speaking. I was going to start today with some writing and then move on to reading, but I started watching this ridiculous romantic comedy that I'm not going to admit to - totally predictable, but really adorable and so depressing, I just wanted to smack the protagonist for most of it, but that's the point - and I was reading while I was watching it, or while the internet was being dodgy, rather, so I'm going to finish reading this book and see how I feel after that. I would love to be able to take some of these books back to the library, but at the same time it's 21 degrees out there and yesterday was really windy on top of that. My very good friend said he felt like he was in a snow globe on the way to work. He works on a corner, so the flakes were sort of going everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and then it stopped, and then it started again, as if someone was shaking up our world.

And to pull it all together, what I was reading about yesterday was spiraling or looping in narration, strange loops and tangled hierarchies, which doesn't really happen in any of the novels I'm writing about because all three remain on the level of primary diegesis (except in the case of Pale Fire, of course, whose hierarchy is sort of flipped instead of tangled because the poet doesn't mention the commentator at all, if I'm not mistaken, though the commentator tangles his narration like hair straight from the bath), but the looping of lines in Hot Fuzz, the repetition, often in the mouths of other characters, was just fantastic. The films-within-the-film, which the movie is obviously parodying even without the just-this-side-of-overkill-enough-to-be-fabulous viewing of the films in the film, the reenactment of some of the scenes from the films, the weird miniature town toward the end. There are so many facets to this film, it would be sort of impossible for me to spoil it for you unless I had you strapped to a chair for 121 minutes and forced you to watch it. In which case you would be watching it, which is the opposite of spoiling it for you, so there you go.

I did, in fact,

forget to blog yesterday. I managed to begin my close reading of Pale Fire, however, which consisted of going through the first Canto of the poem section and creating an outline of the catastrophic events and some supporting quotes. Pale Fire differs from the other two novels in that there are two first-person narrators, which I have to keep in mind because in my other readings of the novel, I've often neglected the poem by John Shade in favor of the commentary by Charles Kinbote for the simple reason that it does, in fact, take over the text. That's kind of the point.

A question about names: when I'm writing about different characters, when anyone is writing about them, how do we make decisions about what to call them? What I mean by that is that I refer to Merricat and Constance only by their first names, Jonah as well (we aren't told his last name), but the two men in Pale Fire are Shade and Kinbote. Yet it's Aunt Maud, Sybil, and Hazel - though they are all Shades as well. I wouldn't call Merricat "Blackwood," even if I kept with the pattern of the former example and referred all other Blackwoods by their first name. But John and Charles feels weird. Why is that? Well, for one thing, Kinbote refers to Shade as Shade, to Sybil as Sybil, etc. For another thing, this book was published in 1962, i.e., before the wave of feminism that followed shortly thereafter. Perhaps most importantly, critics have likewise referred to Shade as Shade, Sybil as Sybil, Kinbote as Kinbote, etc. But I find it rather repugnant to refer to Shade as Shade, Sybil as Mrs. Shade (Mr. and Mrs. Shade would be better, but Mr. Shade would get clunky, I think).

What's the responsible thing to do? Perpetuate the weird gendering of naming by following the authors' and critics' leads? Or risk confusing my reader by changing things up? After all, Jonah is a John as well, and we can't forget about the notorious Charles in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Kinbote is ostensibly King Charles II, so I could refer to him as Charles II, but that would be even more clunky than Mr. Shade.

This is a nit-picky issue, and I am well aware of that, but it matters. What we call characters reflects what we call people, and how we refer to people affects how we think of them. The case of John Shade is the most indicative here, I think. By calling him Shade and the women in his life by their first names, we assume a greater familiarity with them, a more formal stance with him, a casual treatment with them, a show of greater respect for him. Because he is a main character or because he is male? Similarly, I don't want to refer to him by his profession - "the poet" - because I wouldn't do that with any other characters here. Is Constance "the cook" or "the gardener"? Certainly not. I wouldn't call Jonah the journalist or the writer. But because Kinbote refers to Shade as "the poet," critics (including myself) have done likewise and have carried this over to referring to Kinbote as "the commentator." It's insidious because it seems so trivial.

My adviser, in her dissertation, when using possessive pronouns for unspecified singular persons, consistently used "her," as in "the reader and her book" or "the critic and her analysis," that kind of thing. I found it to be a little off-putting, but only in the same way that referring to everyone as "he." What's ironic is that her dissertation is about silencing and by using only feminine pronouns, she is silencing the patriarchal tradition of silencing the female voice, but also thereby silencing the male voice.

I'll probably just footnote it, acknowledge that I'm following the convention in the novels and the criticism that has followed those conventions as well. That way it's not confusing but I'm still drawing attention to the issue. Have I put too much thought into this? or not enough?

whaddya know?

Apparently I am, in fact, capable of waking up at 9am and working all day. Okay, not all day, but I've gotten a fair amount of work done so far and I'm going to do some more work as soon as I publish this. It's amazing how much one can accomplish with one's internet connection isn't working and one's roommate is asleep so there's nothing one can do about it. I did a fair amount of writing this afternoon. 1700 words, to be exact. I was basically just riffing off the first chapter of Cat's Cradle, the length of which is one page.

Here's the thing: in all three novels, the opening paragraphs provide a disproportionately large amount of information, and they all three point to the end of the story being narrated. In Cat's Cradle, though we don't have some of the more vital details, such as the near-total destruction of the planet by ice-nine, we do know that a little-known religion called Bokononism will play a major role in the story and we know that the narrator believes everything to have happened according to a plan that was not his own. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle (there has to be a way to shorten that without calling it The Castle, please! WHALitC doesn't work for me either), on the first page we learn that the narrator is Merricat and she is 18, that she may have a preoccupation with death, and that everyone in her family except her sister Constance is dead. In the first lines of Pale Fire, similarly, we find out that the poet whose poem's commentary we are reading is dead, we learn the setting in New Wye, Appalachia, USA (just as in Cat's Cradle, we can see - if only in hindsight - that Jonah is narrating from the Caribbean island of San Lorenzo), and we are told the structure of the poem and the organizational habits of the poet, which the commentator seems to appreciate. Likewise, we learn that our narrator is not as professional as we might expect from an academic literary commentator.

So, all three narrators are unreliable (quote/unquote), but I'm steering clear of that issue as much as possible because what narrator is "reliable"? What does that mean? It seems to me that all narrators are varying degrees of unreliable, perhaps, so we could say that these three are especially unreliable or whatever. Or we could label them "mad," as many critics have done, but that raises the question, what is sanity? I have no interest in either. Actually, that's not true, I have too much interest in both issues to do either of them justice in a 12-13,000 word paper ostensibly about other things.

I had to explain to someone else what I was writing about, and I think that each time I have to do this, I clarify what it is I'm talking about. I said something along the lines of: I'm analyzing three novels in which the narrated events take place before the time of narration, and the stories are all marked by catastrophic events of some kind, so that the story is told as if all events lead up to the catastrophe and then lead away from it. What I mean by that is that there are these markers, these events, to which greater meaning is attributed, they mark temporal boundaries: things happen either before the event or after. On top of that, there are several levels of markers and events, meaning that several stories are layered on top of one another, each told from after the fact, each told as if the events leading up to the marker somehow point toward the marker.

So what I'm interested in with this project is how the past is narrated. Essentially, how history is told. And especially in this time period, the late 1950s/early 1960s. Why do these novels present a teleology, and why do all roads lead to destruction? Without going too much into the whole nuclear proliferation thing, and without talking about containment. I could make that argument, I think, but I'm not going to. It's a bit passe in literary circles now, so I've read, though it was all the rage twelve years ago when Alan Nadel's Containment Culture came out.

Anyway, good work day. Maybe I will reward myself a little.

where does the day go?

Today has been a rather productive day so far, all in all, except that I've done little work on my thesis other than thinking about it. I talked to my best friend on the phone, I had a light breakfast, tried some cheese (I like to branch out), boiled some eggs for a later meal, got my acceptance letter from a literary seminar in St Petersburg, Russia, bought a plane ticket, called my bank about something entirely unrelated, and now I'm doing laundry, after which I will go help my friend finish moving, and then I'll probably have a drink or two. See how nonchalantly I just ran all that together?

I'm going to Russia. I have a plane ticket from New York to St Petersburg, Russia. I'm going to be in St Petersburg for three weeks, for a literary seminar. I... there are no words. That's 4300 miles, that's... somehow not the farthest away from home that I've ever been, that's weird. Apparently Warsaw remains at the top of the list, due to the shift in origin. Anyhoo, it will still be the farthest east of home I will have been, so that's something. Incidentally, the farthest west of home I've ever been is somewhere on the island of Oahu.

Time to go help a friend. And read on the train. Cat's Cradle. Yesterday on the train, I was thinking about how Bokononism is layered onto the narrative, and then I was reading the part where Jonah is interviewing Dr. Asa Breed, and one critic I read described how unrelenting Jonah was in this scene, how disparaging of science and scientists he was, how bitter he was toward humanity in general, and while I agree that Jonah's portrayal of human beings is not always the rosy picture we may get in ...wait, I have no examples for that... I found it particularly interesting that Jonah has very few dialogue tags, and there is very little exposition other than Dr. Breed's dialogue tags, which present him as the one getting all up in arms, getting very impatient, beginning to shout, while Jonah keeps asking questions. I need to have a writing day. Ah, well, maybe tomorrow.

Oh, and remember what I said about the Super Bowl ads? The New York Times has an article today about the ethnic stereotypes in those Salesgenie.com ads that rubbed me the wrong way. I find it highly weird, however, and rather disturbing, that the Bud Light ad featuring Mencia teaching a group of male immigrants how to pick up chicks was defended by Budweiser's guy, "Robert C. Lachky, executive vice president for global industry and creative development at Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis," who cited their extensive research to make sure the ads weren't offensive. Um, really? The one man holds up a chicken and tells a woman she has her eyes. I realize that the Super Bowl is a traditionally macho event in a traditionally macho sport in a traditionally macho society, but really??? First of all, I love football. I get that from my mother. Second of all, as stated in the article, 95 million people tuned in, meaning a pretty broad demographic, some of whom I would like to think are thinking like me. That may be a bit too much to ask, but here's hoping.

In most of the ads that I saw (I have to go, so I'll have to be more specific later), the men were the actors, the women were being acted upon. One woman, in a Chase Bank commercial where the husband fancies himself a James Bond-type because he thwarts identity theft when the bank calls him (meaning that although he is being acted upon by the bank, he assumes the role of subject, the bank has somehow given him the power to do something), looks at him like, "oh, honey," as in: you're so dumb and cute and in charge even though you're not and I'm totally in the role of good woman behind her strong man. Blagh. Must go. More ranting to come, I'm sure. ;)

where does the day go?

Today has been a rather productive day so far, all in all, except that I've done little work on my thesis other than thinking about it. I talked to my best friend on the phone, I had a light breakfast, tried some cheese (I like to branch out), boiled some eggs for a later meal, got my acceptance letter from a literary seminar in St Petersburg, Russia, bought a plane ticket, called my bank about something entirely unrelated, and now I'm doing laundry, after which I will go help my friend finish moving, and then I'll probably have a drink or two. See how nonchalantly I just ran all that together?

I'm going to Russia. I have a plane ticket from New York to St Petersburg, Russia. I'm going to be in St Petersburg for three weeks, for a literary seminar. I... there are no words. That's 4300 miles, that's... somehow not the farthest away from home that I've ever been, that's weird. Apparently Warsaw remains at the top of the list, due to the shift in origin. Anyhoo, it will still be the farthest east of home I will have been, so that's something. Incidentally, the farthest west of home I've ever been is Waianea on the island of Oahu.

Time to go help a friend. And read on the train. Cat's Cradle. Yesterday on the train, I was thinking about how Bokononism is layered onto the narrative, and then I was reading the part where Jonah is interviewing Dr. Asa Breed, and one critic I read described how unrelenting Jonah was in this scene, how disparaging of science and scientists he was, how bitter he was toward humanity in general, and while I agree that Jonah's portrayal of human beings is not always the rosy picture we may get in ...wait, I have no examples for that... I found it particularly interesting that Jonah has very few dialogue tags, and there is very little exposition other than Dr. Breed's dialogue tags, which present him as the one getting all up in arms, getting very impatient, beginning to shout, while Jonah keeps asking questions. I need to have a writing day. Ah, well, maybe tomorrow.

Oh, and remember what I said about the Super Bowl ads? The New York Times has an article today about the ethnic stereotypes in those Salesgenie.com ads that rubbed me the wrong way. I find it highly weird, however, and rather disturbing, that the Bud Light ad featuring Mencia teaching a group of male immigrants how to pick up chicks was defended by Budweiser's guy, "Robert C. Lachky, executive vice president for global industry and creative development at Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis," who cited their extensive research to make sure the ads weren't offensive. Um, really? The one man holds up a chicken and tells a woman she has her eyes. I realize that the Super Bowl is a traditionally macho event in a traditionally macho sport in a traditionally macho society, but really??? First of all, I love football. I get that from my mother. Second of all, as stated in the article, 95 million people tuned in, meaning a pretty broad demographic, some of whom I would like to think are thinking like me. That may be a bit too much to ask, but here's hoping.

In most of the ads that I saw, the men were the actors, the women were being acted upon. One woman, in a Chase Bank commercial where the husband fancies himself a James Bond-type because he thwarts identity theft when the bank calls him (meaning that although he is being acted upon by the bank, he assumes the role of subject, the bank has somehow given him the power to do something), looks at him like, "oh, honey," as in: you're so dumb and cute and in charge even though you're not and I'm totally in the know but will let you have all the power you think you have. Something like that.

everything but.

actually working on the thesis.

To do list recap:
1. vote in the primaries (couldn’t. That’s what I get for not declaring a party affiliation.)
2. library (dropped off four, picked up 6 more)
3. post office
4. kmart
5. whole foods
6. pick up tickets for an Anne Carson appearance at NYU on Thurs. (decided I don’t in fact have time and need to be writing my thesis)
7. return gift from Old Navy

My qualification of #6 is a little ironic because instead of working tonight, I'm going to help a friend move and then have drinks. These things are important too. Tomorrow I'm going to work all day until I go and help him finish moving, which will probably about the same time as tonight: fairly late in the evening. I have stuff for a healthy breakfast. I may do laundry tomorrow. I need to do a bit of cleaning, but I won't let it take up my day or anything. An hour tops, I think. Onwards and upwards. Or to the garment district, at any rate.

productivity

is tricky business. I've gotten a bit done this evening, but partly because I decided one book wasn't worth my time reading (I couldn't handle the style and what I deemed a lack of organization), and I'm almost done picking apart another one based almost entirely on Index entries. If I get it done tonight, that's one more book to return tomorrow.

I also spent far too much time being a little too amused by LolCats. This one is currently my favorite for so many reasons, not least of all because I didn't get it on the level that was most obvious to my friend when she saw it for the first time... What can I say? I'm a bit preoccupied.

Tomorrow's to do list (with additions and reordered for priority):
1. vote in the primaries
2. library (drop off four so far, pick up 2-5 more)
3. post office (I have to mail a package and my rent)
4. kmart
5. whole foods
6. pick up tickets for an Anne Carson appearance at NYU on Thurs.

Actually, this last one would make more sense at #3 for efficiency of travel, and I will most likely go to the post office before the library, but whatever.

I'm going to force myself to work for at least another 20 minutes and then go to bed. I feel the need to confess that I haven't really been practicing my Spanish, even though with each passing day I feel like it is more and more imperative. Perhaps I will read a bit in bed. Yes, that seems fitting.

not so much

But it was totally worth it.

Time to buckle down for a solid three hours.

Tomorrow's to do list:
1. post office
2. kmart (if I remember what I needed to get...)
3. library (drop off three so far, pick up 2-5 more)
4. vote in the primaries (if I'm in fact registered as a democrat, which I'm not sure if I am)
5. pick up tickets for an Anne Carson appearance at NYU

23 days...

It's Super

Bowl Sunday. So far, I have been overwhelmingly impressed by how blatantly several of the commercials have perpetuated rather ridiculous gender and racial stereotypes, often in the same thirty seconds.

And I went to brunch today at Dos Caminos Third Ave, and it was fabulous. Great food, great service, friendly and attentive staff and management. I had the Chilaquiles, which are tortilla chips baked in tres chile salsa over refried black beans with two sunny-side up eggs, queso fresco, avocado, pico de gallo, and crema. I crave them.

Anyway, I have to admit that I'm getting more and more stressed out about this whole thesis thing. I need to channel this energy (read:guilt and anxiety) a bit more, and I totally did on Friday night. Instead of going to the reading and the slumber party as originally planned, I read all evening. I also goofed off quite a bit, but I got more done than I would have had I not been sitting in front of my computer, so there's that. I'm hoping the same thing happens tonight, I suppose. Add to that the fact that I'm watching the game at home instead of at a bar, watching it with someone who's watching it less than I am, and not eating or drinking anything, and something productive is bound to happen if only accidentally.

It may appear

as though I neglected to blog yesterday, but really that's almost all I did. I had to get something out of my system. ...That's sort of a misrepresentation of the facts.

Anyway, mountains have been reduced to foothills, at least. Out of this stack of twelve, I only have to read the entirety of four of them, and I only need to skim them, no close readings. Then I have another book on hold at the library, and I need to pick up some theoretical texts, I have two more here I need to read, and one online, and then I have to reread the three novels. As soon as I finish The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which will probably be tonight, Cat's Cradle will become my subway reading again.

Intensive for a few hours worked great the other day, but I hit a natural break after three and a half hours, and after making dinner the thought got into my head to go out, so I didn't get much done after that. Same with last night, but I had plans, kind of, which worked out differently than planned, and then I decided to get into a little trouble, which I was rather successful at. Safe trouble, but still. And I'm pretty sure I spoke my mind about what was bothering me yesterday, and I got some honest information I didn't particularly enjoy hearing, and then I got some other information that is always nice to hear, even when it's thoroughly weird. ...I'm not making any sense, I know this. Suffice to say, I'm going to be studying intensively for the next four hours or so and then I'm going to a reading and then a slumber party, believe it or not. I don't think I'm actually going to be spending the night, though. We'll see. There is such a thing as too much of a social life.