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But relax... there's other people a lot nicer coming up. We call them "losers." --Dedee Truitt (Christina Ricci) |
Tuesday, September 21, 1999 Ricci, Repentance, Reports, Et Cetera Sorry it's been so long since last time. In short: Something probably happened on Friday and Saturday, but nothing really comes to mind. Well, except that I watched The Opposite of Sex again on Saturday night. I love that movie a lot more than I should. I mean, I can enumerate the film's problems as well as the next person: All the female characters are two-dimensional at best... which still beats the male characters, who are one-dimensional at best. The plot is contrived, the characters' observations on life and sex aren't worth the paper they're not printed on, and so on, and so forth. On the plus side, it stars Christina Ricci, who narrates the entire film. Good enough for me. (In fairness, I should note that this appears to be very much a matter of opinion; either you love the narrator's dialogue, or you run from the theatre clutching your ears and screaming for mercy. I'm decidedly in the former camp.)
From there to, um, Yom Kippur, which began Sunday night, and continued through Monday. (And if you think that's an awkward transition on screen, you ought to try it in real life.) At any rate, I spent it in Far Rockaway, as usual. And that's about all I have to say about that. Anyway, in bits of time scrounged up on Sunday afternoon and last night (after the fast), I managed to write roughly half the post-camp issue of my newsletter for the Campers' Paradise. Somehow, I've got to finish it by the end of the week, this being the final final deadline.
Arrived home late last night, and belatedly began typing my homework for Women's Studies 201. I ended up having to go to sleep partway through, being exhausted. Finished it up this morning, just before zooming off to work. Alas, that meant I didn't get to a whole lot of stuff I wanted to get to, and I said almost nothing about the second of the two articles I was supposed to be reacting to, as I ran out of time. Oh, well. I'll do better next time. On the bright side, I got my first paper back, and the professor liked it rather a lot, so that much is well with the world. So if I get back on track in the third one, and then stay there, I should be fine.
English 255 is going okay. Well, okay, fine, I'm not liking it all that much, but it's a literature survey course, so I wasn't especially expecting to. Part of it is the selections we've been reading so far: James Joyce and H.D., neither of whose work I particularly care for. (Although this is my first contact with H.D., and her later poems are doing more for me, so the jury's still out on that one.) And to illustrate the professor's points about imagism, we did a bit of William Carlos Williams today, focusing on the one about the wheelbarrow. You know, "so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens." Except that he throws in a few line breaks:
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so much depends upon
a red wheel
glazed with rain
beside the white
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Frankly, in my point of view, this makes for a fairly vague, boring sentence, and certainly isn't much of a poem. The mystery to me is that somebody presumably paid him for the thing. However, given the large number of people who like it, that's clearly too judgmental on my part. That I don't see anything in it doesn't mean there isn't something of value there. Now, my professor did mention along the way that one thing imagist posts tried to do was make people think in images rather than concepts. Which resonated with me somewhat, as it may be the key to why I'm Not Getting It. Because I do think in concepts, and I don't think in images. So maybe my brain's just wired the wrong way to appreciate this sort of thing. Maybe.
In other news, my nephew's bris was today, and he's been named after my grandfather: the grandfather who died in that car crash just over a month ago. And it looks like I'll be seeing the kid and his parents in a few days, as they'll be in Far Rockaway over Sukkos, which is the next holiday on the agenda. (This time of year, you can hardly put your finger down on the calendar without hitting a Jewish holiday.) And finally, I return to the ocular plastic surgeon (or whatever his official title is) tomorrow, so he can look at my eyelid and tell me what he wants to do next. I'll keep you posted. Oh, and I finally got both the VCR remote and a blank tape, so I've been recording and viewing Sesame Street at last! Ah, bliss...
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