Haven’t said much of anything lately except American Idol stuff, and I don’t really have a good reason for that. (If I have a reason, it’s that I have too much time, and thus don’t need to use blogging as a procrastination tool.)

  • I am taking two classes this semester instead of the four I had last semester; most grad students only take two, so this is normal.
  • One class is on European Romanticism–basically a sort of comparative literature survey course, using texts and translations from England, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain, Norway, Hungary, Denmark, etc. The professor is a little intimidating just because he knows EVERYTHING about everything, and when you present on someone, he expects you to know EVERYTHING about them. (I present for the first time next Monday…so I will be researching today and tomorrow for that.) But he is also British, so there’s that. I like him a lot, but he really does KNOW EVERYTHING.
  • The other class is on the Harlem Renaissance, and it’s actually more interesting than I was expecting. I’ve never read any of these writers (1910s-1920s black writers), and we’re getting a good interdisciplinary chunk of the contemporary politics, music, art, etc. as well as literature, which suits me perfectly. Of course, not knowing anything about any of the works meant that I kept my mouth shut when people were choosing presentation topics until the end, so I got poetry. *sigh* Oh well.
  • I hate presentations. Grad classes are all presentations. What’s that about?
  • But in comparison with last semester, when I wrote upwards of 80 pages of papers and assignments for class, this semester I only have something like 40 pages maximum to write. In European Romanticism, we have three papers, and he gave us 2000 words MAX. That’s like, six and a half pages. MAX. Score.
  • Also, I am a research assistant this year, which is actually a good bit of fun, I think. The professor I work for is in the rhetoric and composition area, and I don’t want to talk much about her research because she’s doing a fairly large project right now for publication this summer or fall. But she’s working with multimodal writing…basically, using other methods of conveying information than your standard academic essay–pictures, video, interaction, etc. It’s fairly interesting, and is making me consider a lot of things I never thought about before.
  • For part of the project, I’m transcribing interviews, and she gave me this transcription machine, which is sorta cool, in a old-tech sort of way. It plays the tape and you run it with your foot, so you don’t have to stop typing to run it back a bit or stop it playing while you catch up. Seems like we ought to be getting pretty close to good enough voice recognition technology, though, to render the whole manual transcription thing obsolete. Not that I mind. I enjoy typing and copying things. One thing that’s interesting though, is how automatically I translate the conversation into proper writing. I’m supposed to keep it pretty much as it is on the tape (though she said to leave out “ums” and stuff like that), but I also tend weed out “you know” and “like” and other interjections that I really want to leave in to show when the interviewee was hesitating or backtracking. It’s harder to type exactly what you hear than you would think!
  • I drove down to Austin last Saturday pretty much exclusively to see Pan’s Labyrinth, and it was totally worth it. Probably the best movie I’ve seen from 2006. Although Brick is still a really close second. But if Pan’s Labyrinth is playing where you are, I suggest you go see it. But don’t take the kids. It may be a fantasy, and it may have a young girl as the protagonist, but it ain’t a kids’ movie. I’ll probably write more about it later.
  • I just finished the second season of Grey’s Anatomy on DVD, and it BROKE ME. Now, to find the tape of this season…
  • I’ve been reading David Bordwell and Kirstin Thompson’s blog pretty regularly (and if you’re interested in film studies, you should be too), and when I was working for my professor in her office the other day, I saw she had their textbook Film Art, which I’ve been wanting to read since I found their blog. And she let me borrow it! She’s pretty awesome.
  • Apparently I’m not meant to get allergy shots down here. I went to start them today (after having been cleared by the doctor here a couple of weeks ago), and they had to call my allergist at home before giving me a shot because it’s been so long since I’ve had one, and they wouldn’t let me get one until I’d seen my doctor! At home! IN ST. LOUIS! Woulda been nice to know that when I was home at Christmas. Because I’m not planning to be back in St. Louis again until May. I don’t know why it was okay in November for me to get shots here without seeing my doctor at home, but it’s not now. Ah well. I’ve been fairly fine without them. Just annoying is all.
  • Speaking of annoying. A few rules for cinema patrons, brought to you due to the two morons in front of me today. 1) Even if there’s only one other person in the theatre (i.e., me), you still shouldn’t treat the movie like your own private Mystery Science Theatre. 2) If you must talk to each other, don’t sit with a seat IN BETWEEN YOU, thus forcing you to use normal voices. Use your quiet voices. 3) Turn your cellphones OFF. Both of them. 4) And, if your cellphone does happen to ring, DO NOT ANSWER IT. 5) If you must answer it, STEP OUTSIDE and DO NOT CARRY ON A CONVERSATION IN THE THEATRE ON YOUR CELLPHONE. People complain about the state of moviegoing these days; sometimes it is the theatre’s fault. But more often, the reason going to theatres isn’t fun is because the audience is boorish. Sometimes audiences are great–first night audiences at fan favorites (like Lord of the Rings) are awesome, and generally art-house/indie audiences are enjoyable. But multiplex audiences are horrible and should be banned from ever leaving their own homes.
  • I just upgraded to WordPress 2.1, and it now autosaves posts! Hell yeah.