--Chaucer

It is Thursday night. I am exhausted.

Those seem to go hand-in-hand. It's partially because it's the end of the week, partially because it's the deadline at the college paper... and, this semester, it's mostly because my art class is on Thursday, which means that I spend all of Wednesday night doing my homework.

This week, our assignment was to depict the country. Not the U.S.; rather, the country, as opposed to the city. Peaceful vistas, rolling hills, flowing streams, the occasional cow... that sort of thing. In black construction paper on a white background, with natural (curvy) shapes, and not getting too literal.

I didn't quite know what to do. So I started cutting out mountains in black construction paper last night, and moved them around an illustration board, in hopes of finding something that would work.

Draft #1 was way too literal, and not very good. A couple of mountains, a stream or something, a couple of fence posts, and a few birds. Bleah.

Attempt #2 was closer to the mark. I had this sort of rolling black silhouette of a couple of gentle hills and a valley, going about halfway up the page. I had a somewhat similar while silhouette going over the lower part of that, and the edge of a black sun or moon peeking in on the top. And a couple of little bird silhouettes, held over from the previous draft. But it didn't quite work.

(Hmmm. If my last allusion to a fable is any indication, I'm about to be asked for the story of the town mouse and the country mouse. Tell ya what; maybe that'll be Friday's entry.)

I will grant that the country has fresh air. I will grant that the country has beautiful scenery. I will grant you can actually see the stars in the country. I will grant that the country can be a nice place to visit... but for no longer than an extended weekend, please.

Here's the situation. It's four in the morning. I am sitting on a folding chair, which has been cleared of the books and papers that usually occupy it, because my bed is covered in construction paper, cutting tools, and a sketch pad. This includes the current draft of my art homework, which I'm fiddling with, while I listen to a They Might Be Giants concert in RealAudio over the 'Net. At this point, I decide that I want to take a step back for a bit and talk this over with a friend, if possible.

At four A.M.?

No problem. Fire up my favorite MUD, and-- yes! She's on!

With the TMBG concert still going, I proceed to pour out the tale of tonight's crisis -- I always seem to have a crisis -- to a net.friend of mine who lives in a time zone where it's not as insanely late as it is in New York. When you add in my insomnia, we get to chat fairly frequently. :-)

So I explain my trouble, not really expecting to get any help, but figuring that it would at least help to talk -- err, type -- it out. But, lo, she had an idea, and sent me off to see a couple of landscapes on the Web. One didn't do much for me, but the other...

...the other had some similarity to what I'd already had, with the addition of a few other elements. One of which worked so well, I found myself compelled to steal it. Specifically, the upper-left-hand corner of this print. I hadn't thought of adding a boundary like that. And it worked really well.

So I did something like that, and rotated the black silhouette I had so it ran on an angle from close to the lower-left corner to close to the upper right, and I added a few rippling white stripes, and a little bit of a circle peeking in on the upper right, and -- and I more or less knew this was a mistake, but I couldn't stop myself -- a couple of tiny birds again.

I'm still not sure if what I did constitutes plagiarism. I know the rules with text, but what are the guidelines with images? Especially when you're only grabbing a particular element of a piece... I don't know. And I ought to, I suppose, as plagiarism is the cardinal academic sin. As it stands, I'm uneasy about it.

To make a long story short, I finished it at 6:00 AM, went to sleep at about 6:15, got up around 9:20, and somehow made it through the day until now. My professor liked the piece in general, except for the birds, which took this lovely abstract piece and suddenly locked it into a particular interpretation. He was right. Oh, well.

So. I spent much of Wednesday afternoon finally reading the general prologue to Canterbury Tales. Parts of it out loud, using the guidelines we'd gotten in class, and the handout the professor gave us. (Mary Anne's entry for yesterday covers some of that territory, actually.) Around 4:30 PM, I finished, and started working on the short essay.

The essay itself hardly bears mentioning. It was a fairly bland 500-word (roughly; I went over a bit, I think) comparison of the Friar and the Parson, and the way they're described. If you've read the work, you can figure out everything I wrote with ease, and if you haven't, you won't care.

What I did have a bit of fun with was the ancillary requirement. In addition to the essay, we were supposed to take one sentence from the description of each character, and translate it into modern English, just to show that we were properly understanding the text.

If I had had the time, I would have gone for a Country-Western song parody, incorporating large swatches of both. Being pressed for time, I went with the following:

Ful wel biloved and familier was he
With frankelains over al in his contree,
And with worthy wommen of the town--
For he hadde power of confessioun,
As said himself, more than a curat,
For of his ordre he was licenciat.

The Friar, beloved was he,
And familiar throughout the country.
    With Franklins aroun'
    And the women in town,
He was popular as he could be.

Confessions, he'd power to hear,
As he said himself, it was clear;
    Even more than a curate
    His best rate was your rate,         (Sorry about that...)
For his order had licensed him there.

Lines 505-506, translated as a brief exercise in the even more modern Rap form:

And shame it is, if a priest take keep,
A shiten shepherde and a clean sheep.

I tell ya, Father, it sure ain't pretty
If the sheep is clean, but the shepherd's shitty.

Anyway, class itself was okay. The good part was when he played a cassette tape of a really good reader reading the start of the general prologue. I really, really want a copy of that. Although I might note that when he stopped the thing, he said, "Whew! He went really fast, didn't he?" and much of the class nodded its assent.

I hadn't noticed, of course. :-)

Which doesn't mean I had to add my own little shot of gasoline to the fire this week. See, we finally got an editor for the news section. So he was working on an article on that Task Force meeting I went to last week, and I noticed that the article basically ignored most of the issues brought up there, and instead devoted itself to what it rather subjectively claimed was a clear example of student apathy, because there weren't very many students there.

I've already ranted about this in print once tonight, so I'll spare you the whole thing for now. But suffice it to say that I had a lot of space to fill this week, and I ended up devoting most of it to rebutting (and slamming) our headline article, and filling in some of the gaps it left. I have a strong feeling that I Went Too Far, but it's too late now.

(For the record, in the last third, I finally got back to the impeachment thing, basically saying much of what I posted here the other day, only not as well.)

Otherwise... we got it done tonight, minus the music section, which is a very long story. In the end, the Managing Editor and I put the thing together, the Editor-in-Chief and Senior Editor being away this week. And we realized that we had 13 pages.

We need to have a multiple of four. Usually, if we're one or two pages short, we add filler pages. If we're three short, we try to drop a page. The catch was, nothing was droppable.

The news section had to stay. Ditto for features. The paid ads had to stay. Of the three pages in Op/Ed, one had the staff box and couldn't budge; the second had the continuation of an article from the first page; and the third had a paid ad in the corner. Entertainment stayed. The usual, obvious, solution would have been to drop the one page of poetry, which I'd finally gotten for the first time this semester... but we'd included a blurb about it on the front page, where we usually hyped the music section.

So. I'd made one page of filler earlier in the week. Two pages to go. So I whipped up a couple pages of filler really quickly; an ad for a Sports Editor, which we need, and an ad suggesting that people advertise in the paper. Voila! We put it together, wrapped it up, and barring any last-second catastrophes, it'll be out on Monday. After which I may finally get my first piece of hate mail.