Well, if having her sign her book Reading Lolita in Tehran counts as having met her. I read the book back in June, and was absolutely captivated, and kept it in the back of my mind to see her speak if it ever become remotely possible. And then I found out she was coming to Baylor and, even better, the lecture was free! Awesome.

She spoke about “The Republic of Imagination,” and how important it is to have a “space” in modern life that isn’t defined by politics or politicized religion or science, but defined by an open and curious inquiry into humanity, led by literature. She’s as excellent a speaker as she is a writer, and she had an audience of probably two hundred (they had to bring in about twice as many chairs as they originally had set up in order to fit everyone) absolutely enthralled for over an hour. I think she brought up some excellent points, especially regarding our tendency to conflate all predominantly Islamic countries as “The Muslim World,” when the countries that make up the “Muslim World” range from Morocco to Saudi Arabia to Turkey to Iran to Indonesia–all of which have individual histories and cultures that cannot be so easily reduced to “Islamic.” She suggested that defining all these countries purely by their current status as Muslim-regimed is similar to defining the United States by its two hundred years of slavery and segregation, and Europe by the Inquisition and Hitler. Now, I understand that there is a very real difference between Islam and Christianity, and she doesn’t address that (either in the lecture, or in the book), because she’s really a secular humanist, but her point about failing to take into account the thousands of years of history and literature of these countries because of what is, in Iran’s case at least, a twenty-five-year-old totalitarian dictatorship is well-taken.

In any case, she not only had thought-provoking things to say, but a very personable speaking presence–very humorous and witty. I want to be an academic like her. Except, not in academia. Have to figure that part out…

Just to say, school really gets in the way of movie-watching. So expect pretty pathetic review recaps for the next couple of years, apparently. Even the films I did watch, I seem to have been highly distracted while watching them, so I hesitated to even mention them, but I did anyway. So expect not only a pathetic number of reviews, but also pathetic writing.

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One of these days I shall have a lot to say about adaptation. Unless I burn myself out first on the paper I’m writing about Jane Austen adaptations. But I expect I shan’t, because adaptation is one of the few subjects I find endlessly fascinating.

Anyway, one of the more amusing review vignettes I found in an otherwise undistinguished critical essay: regarding the 1979 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, contemporary reviewer Gloria Emerson “considered the story to be ‘slightly outdated,’” but “still found in it ‘a delightful reminder that women’s lives have improved’ in many ways.” Wow. Last time I checked, apart from superficialities, Pride and Prejudice is considered to be relatively timeless, and Jane Austen’s women are pretty far ahead of their time. Good thing Gloria Emerson’s around to put Austen in her antiquated, repressed place. /sarcasm. I wonder what Gloria Emerson thinks about the explosion of extremely popular Austen adaptations twenty years after her dismissal of Austen’s writing as “outdated.”

Okay, I know St. Louis weather is freaky. But I thought Texas would be a little more…stable. Yesterday? Must’ve been 90 degrees. Walking to school and back twice used up two shirts, lets just put it that way. Then today, I start to walk outside, and get hit in the face with an arctic blast. Perhaps I exaggerate. Perhaps it was in the fifties. Yes. Anyway, I grabbed a jacket, and still literally shivered all the way to school. What’s that about? A forty-degree drop overnight is not cool. (I mean, it is…cool…but you know what I mean.) At the very least, it vastly screwed up my wardrobe choices. ;) And I feel like it’s getting colder, just based on the way I keep having to turn up the thermostat, and even though the air hasn’t come on in a few hours now, I’m getting chills. *breaks out the space heater*

I decided I like writing bibliographies for papers more than the actual papers. They’re straightforward, precise, and clear. I think I’m too analytically-minded to be a great writer in the humanities, but too creatively-minded to be great in other areas. I rebel against whichever type of thinking is required at the given time. I’ve also pretty definitely decided against going on the PhD, which means my sister wins the education competition. ;) I simply can’t take the level of specialization required–even narrowing down to literature originally written in English is bothering me, much less trying to pick an era of concentration, and when the PhD candidates discuss the work they’ve been doing for years on, like, ONE seventeeth-century poet? It makes me want to run screaming for the door in a fit of intellectual claustrophobia. So, no doctorate for me, and I went ahead and laid out my course plans for next year based on a non-thesis track. I’m not entirely sure that’s the right decision, but without the intention of going on the PhD, I just feel like eliminating the thesis would a) remove a lot of stress and b) allow me to take an extra class, thereby adding to the diversity of my knowledge. I like diversity.

I fail at cooking.

So I’m doing Hamburger Helper, right? Simple, right? Just brown the beef, throw in the noodles and sauce mix, simmer for 15 minutes, right? Well, to start with, I had frozen the beef a couple of weeks ago. Planning ahead (!), I put it in the refrigerator yesterday morning to thaw it out. Tonight, still not completely thawed out, so I put it in the pan anyway, and started hacking it apart as best I could. That part actually worked out surprisingly well. The real problem came when I pulled out the Hamburger Helper box and discovered that in addition to two cups of water, I also had to provide a cup and a half of milk. Which I ran out of four or five days ago (I don’t like milk, and I often go for several days without using it, either after I finish my half gallon or after I’ve thrown it out). But, I’ve got this browned beef here, so I’ve got to use it. So I put in some extra water and some butter, thinking maybe that would account for the milk.

Apparently, I didn’t put in ENOUGH extra water to compensate for the milk, because after about five minutes of the simmering, I smell burning and sure enough, the water’s all boiled out and the meat/noodle concoction touching the bottoms and sides of the pot are BLACK. Ugh. Still, the rest looked salvagable, so I got the burned part out from around the good part, put some more water in and then let it continue simmering. After a few minutes, I wonder if it’s not about time for the timer to go off (my microwave doesn’t have a timer, so I use my cell phone alarm). And it’s three minutes PAST time. Didn’t hear it–possibly because I was still scraping black meat from the pot at that point. It wasn’t burned, but it’s not that great, especially since I keep finding residual burned pieces in the middle and have to fish them out.

So here it is, an hour later, and I’ve just stopped eating the worst $6 meal I’ve ever had. So what have I learned? Check the box before starting to cook to make sure I have everything. Make sure there’s enough liquid when simmering stuff that it doesn’t burn (need to remember this with rice as well). Stay better attuned to the progress of the cooking, even though it’s tempting to back to reading and TV. Check the timer more often. Just go buy already-made food instead of trying to make it myself, since I obviously can’t. Back to Ramen noodles for me…can’t screw those up.

(In my flimsy defense, I usually do make Hamburger Helper with reasonable competency. In this case, it was the question of the milk substitution that really screwed everything up.)

No, not for the libraries here. For the ones in St. Louis. Seriously, folks, St. Louis has one of the top library systems in the country, and I already knew that, but my attempts to locate a copy of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 GROUND-BREAKING FILM Contempt in Waco has really made me appreciate St. Louis.

I thought, hey, the Waco county library has a good number of DVDs, including some classic stuff like the Criterion edition of Notorious, they’ve got a fair shot at having one of the top five French New Wave films, right? Wrong. They didn’t have any of the other top five French New Wave films, either (which I just arbitrarily decided were The 400 Blows, Breathless, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and Jules and Jim…that’s pretty close to accurate, except Jules and Jim would have to fight off some competition for the fifth spot).

Okay, so granted, county library with only four branches. Give ‘em a break, right? Surely the Baylor fine arts library will have it, even if it’s on video instead of DVD. Wrong. Out on a limb now…Blockbuster? Of course not. And…we’re out of possible rental/borrowing places. In St. Louis, I guarantee you that both the University City Public Library as well as the Blockbuster down the street from it have Contempt.

Now, I’m in no great bind. I don’t particularly have to see Contempt right now (although I would have liked to before I write a paper due next week on adaptation, since Contempt is about the difficulties of adaptation and every essay I read on the subject brings it up), and of course, I can get it from Netflix. But what in the world did people do in towns like Waco before Netflix was invented? I mean, especially with a big university here, you’d expect there to be a good many people around interested in more than the latest blockbusters, and what are they supposed to do? Go down to Austin every time they want to rent a movie over five years old or, God forbid, from another country? I realize I’m sounding like a film snob, which is not really my intention…I love blockbusters, but I don’t want them all the time. Sometimes I want 1960s artsy French films! And I understand Blockbuster not having it, because it would probably be waste of shelf space based on how often they would actually rent it. But isn’t that what libraries are FOR? To stock things of cultural value rather than marketplace value?

So appreciate that library system up in St. Louis, you guys. Use it and love it, because you may not ever have one as good if you move away from St. Louis.

The Honors College had a professor from University of North Carolina down to do a lecture here last night, and because he’s the mentor of one of my professors, he taught my British lit class today on Joyce. That was pretty cool, but even cooler is that my professor invited a few graduate students to dinner tonight at a NICE restaurant with this UNC professor. And I was one of them! How awesome is that? I’m here only two months and he invites me…the other three graduate students were like second or third year. It was great. We got to talk academic and non-academic stuff, I got to meet my professor’s wife for the first time (she’s really fun), I didn’t make a complete ignorant fool of myself…

I decided I like the part of grad school where I get to hang out with smart people, and people who will actually talk about good books in a deeper way than “Yeah, I liked it” or “It sucked.” Yesterday the Bibliography class (aka “bane of first year grad students’ existence”) went down to the Ransom Center, the huge research library at UT-Austin, and so I got to ride in a bus with smart grad students for like four hours. Of course, all first years, so we all feel really dumb and overwhelmed at this point. But compared with, you know, the average undergrad. Smart. And they talk about interesting things. The part of grad school I don’t like is when we have such a short amount of time to do things that we don’t know how to do. And when it feels like trade school in the sense that I feel like I’m not learning literature, I’m learning how to do things–how to edit manuscripts, how to publish papers, how to present at conferences… And when everyone assumes that you want to get a PhD and be a professor for the rest of your life, and when you hint that you don’t, no one understands.

But yeah. I love being around the intellectual stimulation, and the general milieu of the grad student experience, I just don’t like having to, you know, participate when I feel so inadequate to the task. I’m somewhere between “academic” and “layperson” on a sliding scale, and I don’t know exactly where that means I fit.

However, if I get invited to one of these things again, I’m DEFINITELY going, because I had a great time, great food, and great conversation. And if you ever happen to be in Waco, check out the restaurant 1424. (It’s at 1424 Washington Ave…apparently naming isn’t all it used to be.) It’s a bit pricey, but really worth it for a special occasion. Mom, Dad, next time you’re down. You’ll love it.

Disney-ABC moves away from lawsuits and toward actually offering a compelling product (via Ars Technica)

Now comes news from Disney-ABC that content producers have had a revelation: instead of simply trying to squash piracy, it might be more productive to understand and compete with it.

“So we understand piracy now as a business model,” said [Disney-ABC Television Group president Anne] Sweeney in a recent analyst call. “It exists to serve a need in the marketplace specifically for consumers who want TV content on demand and it competes for consumers the same way we do, through high-quality, price and availability and we don’t like the model. But we realize it’s effective enough to make piracy a key competitor going forward. And we’ve created a strategy to address this threat with attractive, easy to use ways to for viewers to get the content they want from us legally; in other words, keeping honest people honest.”

When you start thinking this way, the goal becomes offering a more compelling product than file-swapping networks can provide, rather that attempting (for instance) to sue the users who like your content.

Excellent. iTunes, eMusic, and others have shown that people are willing to pay reasonable prices to get music and TV shows legally. Obviously, there will still be some piracy, but having the content we want available when we want it (and at the quality we want…still working on that) is worth paying for to most of us. Now if we could just convince the studios and labels that DRM isn’t as cool as they think it is (I repeat, look at eMusic, which is doing very well selling indie music for around $0.25 a track as unprotected MP3s). It’s also nice to see that Sweeney realizes that a lot of the current “pirates” are potentially among her best customers.