Merry Christmas everyone!

Side observation about me and blogging…apparently it’s a procrastination tool, and not something I do when I have free time, given that I have had nothing but free time for the past two weeks, since I’m home on Christmas break, and yet I have not written a thing. One of the things I meant to do was change my music to Christmas music. That has now been done. Not a whole lot of variety of Christmas music; just what I had on hand.

But since we’re speaking of Christmas music, time to plug my very favoritest Christmas CD ever. It’s by a Contemporary Christian group called Point of Grace. I don’t listen to much Contemporary Christian music (I have some sort of mental block against it, although I couldn’t pinpoint the exact source of this mental block–it makes little logical sense, but I think it has something to do with a distaste for the creation of a separate-but-imitative “Christian” pop culture), but somehow I came across Point of Grace, a group of four female singers who specialize in Christian pop with close harmony. Most of their albums are good-but-not-great, but A Christmas Story (not to be confused with A Christmas Story) is consistently the Christmas album I listen to over and over every year.

The disc is a mixture of original songs, hymns, traditional carols, and secular Christmas standards. I think that’s what I like the most about it…the hymns and spiritual songs take on an additional weight because you know that the group really believes them (unlike many current Christmas albums), yet they aren’t put off by including purely secular songs like “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” as you might expect a Christian group to be. They have a very Andrews Sisters sound on some of the popular choices, which works really well, and the sense of orchestration and depth on the hymns, not to mention the excellent mixture of multiple songs together on many tracks all add up to a CD that I can’t listen to just once. Many of the tracks are in the current mix on the music player in my sidebar. Here’s a few of my absolute faves in-post, since I haven’t taken time to hack my sidebar enough to make the music player show on a single-post page.

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The other major album in the sidebar player is Sarah McLachlan’s new Christmas album, Wintersong. She’s one of my favorite singers ever, and though she’s not a Christian (so far as I know…certainly some of her earlier songs would argue against it), her versions of many of my favorite Christmas songs are be-gorgeous. I’m particularly partial to the exotic “The First Noel/Mary Mary” and the ethereal “Silent Night.” And of course, the version of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” that she did with the Barenaked Ladies three or four (or five or six?!) years ago remains a favorite, though she didn’t include it on the new CD. (I think it was on the Barenaked Ladies’ Christmas CD back then, so perhaps it would have been thought redundant.)

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So there’s my contribution to the Christmas spirit. ;)

Two…count ‘em, TWO…movies this month. How freakin’ pathetic is that? And one of them was because I was writing about it for class. Oh well, there are twelve books. That’s right. More than I’ve ever read in a month before, ever. Well, yes, all of them were for school. Or work. A lot of them are plays that I read into a CD burner so that the stage design professor I work for in the theatre department could listen to them later.

Click here to read on!

A couple of weeks ago, Andy Horbal ran a Film Criticism blog-a-thon, basically encouraging other film bloggers to post their thoughts on film criticism and then posting all the links in his blog. I haven’t had time to read all the posts yet, but this one caught my eye. These are Matt Riviera’s Thoughts on Watching and Appreciation Film.

1. Every film is a masterpiece.

I try to give the filmmaker the benefit of the doubt until the end credits roll, or at least as long as his or her film can withstand it. If I assume the film is a masterpiece, then I am forced to find out why as I’m watching it, meaning I can’t be complacent or dismissive. If it’s not clever, then I’m not getting the reference. If it’s not funny, then I’m not getting the joke. If it’s not thought-provoking, then I’m not getting the point. Etc, etc.

If I assume the film is a masterpiece and my first impressions while watching it is that it isn’t, then that’s the impetus I need to think harder about what I’m watching, to work harder at identifying and understanding the filmmaker’s intentions and methods.

Of course some films are duds, and sometimes you might even know they’re duds from the first minutes. But there’s something fascinating about pretending you’re wrong and the filmmaker is a genius, about the process of questioning all preconceived notions of what makes a good film and why. I may not change my mind about the film, but I perhaps won’t feel like I’ve wasted two hours of my life watching it.

I like this. It’s sort of the opposite of my usual “go in with low expectations so I’ll be pleasantly surprised” stance, but it’s also a good way to think about film or books, or anything, especially the part about working harder to see what we might be missing. It’s so easy to be negative on purpose–it’s more fun in a perverse way to tear down than to praise, it’s satisfying to nitpick, and we have a tendency to think a negative review is more “honest.” I consciously try to avoid this (which isn’t difficult, because I really do enjoy the vast amount of films I watch, even if I end up deciding they aren’t very good), but it is fun to denigrate and mock, I have to admit.

I often have two critical appreciations of every film co-existing in my mind, a cold critical judgement which is what’s left when I’ve removed my emotional self from the equation, and a fuller, more holistic appraisal which takes into account what I’ve brought to the viewing experience.

This is true, as well. “I liked it” does not necessarily mean “it was good”–critical judgment does not always coincide with emotional response. Sometimes it’s hard to separate the two. Sometimes I don’t think they need to be completely separated…there are so many film critics out there now that perhaps we can afford to be more subjective. In the aggregate, a more objective view appears.

What do grad students talk about in their downtime? Why, what books to kick out of the canon of English literature, of course!

I think between ten or so of us, we nominated the following for de-canonization:
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Romeo and Juliet (not all of Shakespeare, just R&J)
Thomas Hardy
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Charles Dickens (my contribution)
Virginia Woolf
Ernest Hemingway
Herman Melville (thanks to Lis over at Livejournal for reminding me that we did also nominated Melville, especially Moby Dick!)

I would also add Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I’m sorry, but Holden Caulfield is the whiniest character I’ve ever read, and he needed to shut up and grow up. (Incidentally, I strongly disagree with Woolf’s nomination, and also Fitzgerald’s–I would, however, devalue The Great Gatsby in favor of Tender is the Night.)

What would you kick out of the canon?

I know all I’ve posted about lately is school. But it has been sort of prominent in my mind. ;) Not as prominent as it should have been. I completely gave into my procrastination tendencies this week, writing my final paper for Metaphysical Poetry last night from 7pm-midnight, then collapsing–until I woke up at 4am with inspiration for the final few paragraphs. So yeah, I got up and wrote them from 4-6am, then went back to sleep until 8. Then my plan was to edit it, but I…didn’t. I looked over it, fixed a few words here and there, then turned it in. Whatever. I don’t know if the fact that I don’t care is good because it’s keeping me from getting overly stressed about something that honestly isn’t life and death to me, or if it’s bad, and a sign that I will always be sloppy about everything (which I tend to be now). Oh well. I don’t care. See? Huh.

Hee. I just marked the Metaphysical Poetry paper completed on my Remember the Milk todo list, and it was the last thing on the list, and now it says “You have no incomplete tasks! Woohoo!” Which is exactly how I feel about it. :)

Anyway. Everything is now finished except for a final tomorrow morning, which I do need to study for, because it’s going to be half an essay requiring references to at least twelve different works that we read throughout the semester, and we have to discuss how they all related to some theme (man-woman relationship, man-God relationship, etc.). I think I’m going to do heroism, but it’s a lot easier to find in the Old English/Anglo-Saxon works than in the 16th century stuff, so I’m going to have to make up some stuff.

The GOOD NEWS. I got my Howards End paper back today, and I got a 95%! From one of the hardest graders in the department, or so I hear! And he really thinks I have a chance at publishing it. That’s exciting. Certainly nothing else I wrote this semester is close to publishable, not even the one for Bibliography and Research that’s supposed to be publishable. By the time that one was due this past Tuesday, I was already beyond caring. My goal for next semester: manage my ability to care better, so I get the really important stuff done while I still care about it.

Question for seminary-type people. Or other historically-minded people. I did the Metaphysical poetry paper on the relationship of George Herbert to his religious environment, and I found enough good stuff for a ten-page paper, but it got me interested in Calvin’s church community. Do you have any suggestions for not-too-difficult-to-read books about the Genevan church, and also the Zwinglian one? After skimming three or four books about the Reformation in general, I sensed that some of them are, uh, a little biased, so I wasn’t sure how far to trust some of them beyond the basic historical facts. A lot of the English poetry in the early seventeenth century seems to be as critical of Geneva as of Rome, though from what I can tell, Anglicans like Herbert were largely Calvinistic in theology, so I think it’s more of a critique of Geneva’s liturgical style and system of church government (which I couldn’t quite ascertain from any of the books I had…was it basically Presbyterian? Or congregational?). I guess I just need some good basic Reformation histories that aren’t too biased.

Recutting movie trailers seems to be all the rage these days. Here’s a few of my current favorites (I’m not really choosing all the ones that take comedies and romances and turn them into thrillers and horror films…that what most everyone is making):

Office Space as a psychothriller:

Sleepless in Seattle with Meg Ryan as desperate obsessive:

And my favorite: The Sound of Music as a tense, yep, you guessed it, thriller.

The strain of music at the very end totally makes it.

Just to reverse the trend, here’s the one that I think started it all (at least, it was the first recut trailer to make the blogosphere rounds that I saw):

The Shining as a feel-good family film.

I haven’t seen The Shining, so I don’t really get as much out of this one as the other three, but I know it’s a horror film, and you definitely don’t get that from this trailer!

And you thought trailers actually gave you a good idea of what to expect from the film! Heh.

As of today, my to-do list had 108 school-related tasks completed, two open. I just reached 20 pages on the adaptation paper, after throwing in intertextualism and “literature as resourse” and “film as critical reading” and the auteur theory and populism and statistics on the Indian film industry and descriptions and analysis of Bollywood music and Cahiers du Cinema and Mansfield Park and Shakespeare and Clueless and I don’t know what all else. People keep saying my topic is too broad, but how can that be when I keep having to make up stuff to make my paper long enough? I suppose they mean I’m not going in-depth enough, but really, I tried to go more in-depth but it just got very subjective and polemical and not good. It’s probably not good anyway, but dude. It’s 20 pages. I quit. I read it over, and I think it sounds fine…it flows well from point to point, at any rate. So now I only have one thing left on my to-do list–an 8-page paper for Friday. After two 20-pagers, 8 pages sounds like nothing.

One of my professors is trying really hard to convince me that I want to stay in the field and become a lifetime literary scholar. He hasn’t been successful so far, but it’s at least nice that he thinks I have the capability to do that. Of course, he hasn’t seen this paper. ;)

In other news, a couple of Midnight Club 3 races are perfect for loosening tension between bouts of writing, and can I just say? The Lamborghini is pretty awesome. I just got far enough in the game last weekend to unlock the “exotics,” and I don’t have enough money to buy most of them yet, but I got the Lamborghini, and it just hugs the road like you wouldn’t believe. Don’t know that it’s completely overtaken the Lotus Elise in my heart yet, but it is definitely the more powerful car. But the Elise is my baby. However, you can testdrive the cars even if you don’t have enough money to buy them, and there’s one for $725,000…*checks to see what it is*…Mercedes CLK-GTR, which is just fabulous. Turns on a dime, even without handbraking. And if you’re in the market for a luxury sedan, I recommend the Mercedes AMG CL55. I have no idea how much that one costs in the game, because I won it as a prize, but it corners better than the Elise, and it’s a freakin’ sedan.

They’ve started showing audition clips in the commercials for the next season of American Idol (yeah, I know you didn’t really need the link on that one, but I’m on a linking roll). I can’t wait. One of the girls I just saw in the commercial was singing “Stormy Weather,” and it was beautiful…another great contestant for Standards Night! Woot!

Recommendations:
One by One in the Darkness by Deirdre Madden – I’ll be writing about this more in my November recap, you know, when I get time to write it. But this was the last book we read in 20th Century British Lit, and it was really, really good…set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. I knew very little about Ireland before this class, but the professor is really into Irish literature, so I learned a lot. Some good stuff there, and Madden’s book quickly became one of my favorite things of the semester. (Still not quite as good as Howards End, perhaps, but close.) Anyway. It’s a bit sad perhaps, but extremely well-written.

Zotero – This research tool has been invaluable to me over the past few weeks. It’s only for Firefox 2.0, so you better run out and get that first, if you don’t already have it. Anyway, it’s an extension that sits in your browser, and handles bibliographic citations (if you’re on, like, a library record for a book, Zotero usually figures it out and puts an icon in the address bar, which you can click to add the citation for the book to Zotero). It’s a little buggy with some of the research databases (it says it supports EBSCOhost, which hosts the MLA database, so I use it a lot, but the automatic citation adding thingie doesn’t usually work), but you can always add citations manually. But it combines the straight citation ability with the ability to associate web-page captures, links, other files, and notes to any citation. It’s perfect for taking notes while reading, and keeping track of the fifty-odd different reviews I wanted to look at for the adaptation paper.

Remember the Milk – I keep my aforementioned to-do list on this site, which aside from having killer to-do list capabilities (including due-dates, notes, estimated time per task, etc.), also has the best ever name for a to-do list site. For quick lists, I like Tada Lists, but Remember the Milk has helped me remember to get all my assignments done on time all year. If I hadn’t had it, I totally would’ve been overwhelmed with all the different things, especially in Bibliography and Research, which had ten zillion itty bitty assignments.

That’s all for now.

Dude, twenty pages is a lot. How do people ever write books? And this is the adaptation paper, too. I bet I’ve written more than twenty pages all together about adaptation, between entries here and in my notebook. Yet when I try to make it coherent and support a thesis, rather then, “hey, that’s a really awesome idea!” it doesn’t work. Grr. Also, the paper used to be about Bride and Prejudice, and now it’s more about adaptation, which is fine–but it feels like two papers instead of one. I dunno. I’m at sixteen pages, and I don’t think I can write any more tonight. I know I’ve got another paragraph or so for sure to go in the adaptation part, but the B&P part feels very…random and unclear, mostly because since I moved the focus to adaptation, it doesn’t seem to fit anymore. It’s not necessarily the best example of what I’m trying to convey, but I don’t have time to go find a better example and analyze it. And they want me to publish this thing. Yeah, right. I’ll be glad just to get it turned in.

I decided I’m not a fan of this needing-to-have-a-point-when-I-write thing.