"When You Land % Here It's Time," The Shins

So, there was a birthday. And there was a good dinner, and a deeply fantastic lemon tart. And a night out at the birthday party for my favorite bar. All fairly low-key, but nice.

Today has been spent cleaning the apartment in preparation for the new school term. Granted, the dining room table is still covered in piles of articles and books for Massive Chapter (which is stalled at 16 pages of unconnected close readings. I've been reading all week, trying to formulate a frame for the argument. Gah.) and bags from my mostly-failed back-to-school shopping trips this week. I've managed to buy lots of makeup, but no clothes except for a party dress. Because I clearly needed another party dress. For all my parties.

Ahem, so, makeup. I bought some. Lipstick is apparently back this fall, and I'm in favor of this development. I'm trying out a few different reds and wines. And I bought new eyeliner, which is more exciting than it sounds. There was also a haircut and color, and they are both excellent and delightful.

Tomorrow, Mr. Eph and I head out to locations southerly for my cousin's Backwoods Hippie Jamboree Wedding. I should probably be packing, and checking weather forecasts, but instead I'm watching What Not to Wear and catching up on blogs. And I'm apparently in denial about classes next week, as I have yet to even look at my syllabus for the Big Willie class. Eh.

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"When We're Dancing," Magnetic Fields

I am mercifully without an earworm today, so this is a random track from the player.

How is it that, with a month to go before classes start, I've gotten my second library recall notice of the week? That makes four total for the summer, which is more than I've ever been victim to before. Has the Unspoken Law of Summer Books been changed or something? And this last one is a book I'm currently working with, so I'll be waiting until the very last moment to turn it in and then recall it immediately.

Haircut tomorrow, then a birthday dinner out. No writing, per se, the last couple of days, but lots of reading and note-taking. I think I can see how the frame for the argument is coming together.

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"99 Luftballoons," Nena

Saw Branagh's new As You Like It last night and it was... not good. Really weirdly tricked-up for no good reason, with abrupt and pointless shifts in tone, and most of the great and strange lines were cut out. "Sweep on, ye fat and greasy citizens"? Gone. Touchstone's "Much virtue in If"? Gone. Rosalind's examples of "men have lived and died, but not for love"? Gone. Phebe's railing at Silvius that if she's killed him with love, why isn't he dead yet? Gone. And why is Kevin Kline only doing Sad Clown now? He's a perfectly fine Normal Clown. His Jacques here seemed to be an extension of his Bottom in Midsummer a few years back. Alfred Molina's Touchstone was great, but played as far smarter than he really should be, if you ask me. The epilogue was cute, though.

I just want Branagh to get back to the tragedies. Or the romances, which would fit his oscillation between serious and silly much better. I'd kind of love to see what he'd do with Measure or Winter's Tale.

Very little writing accomplished yesterday, but I did some reading and found a chapter in which the author does a whole lot of the work I'd otherwise have to do to make my point, but arrives at entirely the wrong conclusion. I'd forgotten the best part about other critics: you can make them do all the work and then sweep in to make the better point at the end. So, today, as a break from the ongoing close-reading I've been writing up (why did I think that I needed 20 pages of close-reading? Do I still think this?), I'll be arguing with Big Name Guy in this subfield.

"Touched by the Hand of God," New Order

Clearly, C. has been influencing the music in my head.

Ok, the previous plan? Not terribly successful. I just sat at the dining-room table and looked at all the same online stuff that I look at while on the couch. I managed about two paragraphs over about two hours. The work-every-day thing, I just can't get myself to commit to. So, back to the short bursts of manic productivity that have been my compositional mode for my entire academic career. I'm too old a dog for that particular new trick.

Mostly, I'm trying to convince myself that I can get a full draft of this chapter together before we go out of town next week. Of course, also in the next week I need to: do some back-to-school shopping (clothes! shoes! random crap!), get my hair cut/colored, clean the apartment before classes begin, do a ridiculous amount of laundry, have a birthday. Still, possible!

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"The Frug," Rilo Kiley

My treat today, if I manage to get enough work done, is to buy the album that contains the above song.

I'm trying to trick myself into working by altering my surroundings. Instead of playing around online while sitting on the couch, I've relegated the laptop to the dining-room table. I'm still wasting time before actually working, but I had my coffee while watching the news and reading a magazine, rather than getting sucked in to Jezebel for a couple of hours. Not sure it's working as well as planned, though.

Made my apple-cider pie last night and it turned out better than I had expected. Because I'm more of an improvisational baker than is probably a good idea, I used hard pear cider rather than the plain and sober kind. Still, quite good. Better than Jimmy Fallon's, even.

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"I Love to Hate You," Erasure

I'm pretty sure I danced to this at Neo last week. Ah, the Roaring Nineties.

I'm actually writing right now--one whole paragraph written. I feel guilty when I don't write, I feel guilty when I don't write enough, but at least making a stab at it for a couple of hours helps take the edge off my bad-feeling.

And then I get to make an apple pie. That's the carrot at the end of today's stick.

EtA: Two and a half pages, one scene. Maybe I should look into one of those page-counter widget things. Also, my space bar is sticky, so half ofwhatIwrote looks like that, like I'm writing in classical Latin orsomething.

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"Maggie's Farm," Bob Dylan

I don't even really know this song, but a bit of the chorus was in my head when I woke up this morning. Apparently, my subconscious wants me to know that it ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.

This weekend was a wash, work-wise. And now the rest of the world is heading back to school, which is making me more and more anxious-feeling. I have two weeks until St. Happy starts up, and two weeks after that before UChaos (which is also when I'll have to hand over two chapters to my advisors), so things are not dire quite yet.

But I am going to have to start looking over syllabi soon and decide if I'm going to try to incorporate secondary criticism in my Big Willie class. I'm sure it would be useful, and the best St. Happy students would definitely benefit from that kind of rhetorical model. On the other hand, though, there's a big chunk of each class that struggles just to get a handle on plot and imagery, and I worry that throwing criticism at them would derail even that. And, from talking to a student who was in the other Willie section last spring, I found that the other instructor for this class had assigned a 15-page final paper incorporating 5 different critical sources. Which seems just evil for everyone involved. While I'm still basing my assignments on a syllabus from the tenured professor in the field, I think I'll feel better if I talk to the dept. chair about what I am and should be doing.

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"More Adventurous," Rilo Kiley

Managed about two and a half pages yesterday. I'm starting to get a feel for how much I can get done in a set time-frame.

I should set today's goals, but I have champagne-head from last night's festivities. There may be no writing today.

"Doreen," Old 97's

Again, song in my head.

Today's plan is to work through the last bit of yesterday's scene (I think I know what I'm needing to say about that) and to sketch out the next one. Then I'm off to a thing at my friend A.'s house in celebration of another friend's upcoming wedding. I'm thinking there will be lots of wine drinking and complaining about the department on A.'s balcony. Woo!

I noticed yesterday that I'm struggling both with diction (where have all my words gone?) and the physical act of typing. Don't know what happened to my touch-typing skills, beaten into me by Mr. Greaser (first name Dick, son's name Scooter) in high school. Ah, the happy days of tip-tip-typing along to a Madonna 45 on the ol' Selectric. Good times.

"It's Magic," Pilot

That's the song I woke up with in my head this morning. I had assumed it was ELO, but Google tells me it's a one-hit-wonder by a band called Pilot. Hm.

Yesterday was... not so good. My left eye leaked all day due to sinus stuff, making me unfit for anything other than shopping for shoes online and watching baseball. Will attempt again today.

And I think I'm really done with the hithering and yon-ing and have settled down here. Wordpress is lovely, but that's also where I'm keeping my reading-notes blog, and I couldn't figure out how to isolate that from the main frivolousness, so back to Blogger for me.

EtA: The goal was close-readings of two scenes (the series of close-readings makes up the middle of the chapter, where I'm talking about how a concept is being structured and manipulated). I managed two-thirds of one scene, but it's the knottiest scene I'm dealing with in this chapter, so I'll call that a minor success. Four pages, which is... ok, I guess. There's something more to be said about the closing of the scene, but I don't know what it is quite yet.

Re: Radio Silence

In case anyone's still paying attention, I've moved shop again. This time over to a simple thing that I won't feel the need to prank up with sidebars and such. Just a place to keep track of myself: http://meatcheesebun.wordpress.com/