I'm grumpy

I haven't had much time or desire to write here lately, but this morning I slept through my class this morning, so I thought I'd catch up on my real work.
When I started this blog I was planning on steering away from the self-indulgent whinefest model that most take, but today's entry is an exception. Sorry!

The weather here has turned into pure, icy shit and my classes are superlame. I've realized that learning Old English is really hard and that I've neglected to do it. That and it's getting hard to force myself into actually working; my initiative has just gone out the window. Was it naive of me to think that we'd be reading translations of Old English and analyzing them, rather than translating them? Maybe. Either way, it's a shame because analysis takes a backseat to technicalities like syntax and gender. Being an English student, these things should be easy for me, but I'm really only an English student out of convenience - my plan committee wouldn't let me be a "liberal arts focus" because, though they acknowledged that I wasn't flaky some people chose that focus just because they were flaky and... they wanted to treat flakes and non-flakes equally. Or something? Alls I know is that Griff Maloney got the ok to be a liberal arts student and I didn't, so...
All that's fine, though, cuz I sure do like being an English major and readin' and junk. It's just that being out of my comfort zone and learning about verb clauses and the like is a real pain in the ass right now (whhiinne). How can I keep my mind from going somewhere else when this stuff is so boring! Can someone just put it all in a Schoolhouse Rock song or something?

Also frustrating: I finished The Way We Live Now (yay!) only to come to class and find that literally no one else had read it... and it was ok! (boo!) Not like it was ok because I misunderstood the directions, but just that the professor did not care. Are you telling me that I read a 750+ page Victorian novel about speculative capitalism just for shits and giggles? Yup.

Why? Because my Televising the Victorians class is not a class on adaptation (as it was billed) but a fake film studies class for lazy lit students who want to pretend they're film students but they don't want to read or take real film classes. And that includes my professor who throws out terms like mise en scene that he found in his jumbo film terms dictionary. All of the film knowledge this guy has shared with us comes verbatim from this stupid film terms book and not from actual film - which is fine, because my classmates haven't heard of films like Gone With the Wind. Not that they necessarily should, given that this is an English class, but we're not studying books here either, apparently.
So what are we studying? Amateur theories about how prop-placement and shot distance reflects character and motivation. Seriously. "In this shot they're seen together, indicating fellowship, only to be shot in seperate close-ups next, representing a fracturization of their relationship." Argh! No!

Mostly I'm just looking forward to going to Spain with my mom. We're both pretty exhausted and a break will be really nice. I'm definitely ready for the next and last phase of my overseas adventure. My plan is to grin and bear it and just gun through the remaining work I have, but it's a bit like pulling teeth. Which I guess means that my grin won't be that attractive when I'm done. (har har hurrrk) Send me a message and cheer me up!

Hey, while I have your attention, how about this funny video?:

Coldplay makes you gay, Chaucer makes you stupid

So I'd agreed to go out with my friend and do whatever she wanted to do last night, but upon finding out it meant being 5th-wheel at a gay club I opted out. Her and the three guys she went with came back and told me that it was too "underground" and "grimy" and basically ended up saying that it looked like the product of an actual subculture and not a place that was trying to look like the product of a subculture. I think I'd much rather find myself in a place that caters to an actual subculture than one that caters with the idea of a subculture to bourgeois people intent on "slumming it." But maybe that's an elitist, "slumming it" attitude to take itself.
Either way, I would've been pretty out of place, though a girl basically told me the other day that I was gay because I told her I liked Coldplay. That's cool; I'm secure enough in my heterosexuality to rep Rush of Blood to the Head 4 lif - Lord knows I listen to gayer music. But you'll never find me repping X&Y. That record's for pussies.

I was going to watch Play Time and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul this weekend but, even after downloading the supposedly all-region VLC Media Player I still can't watch Region 2 DVDs. It's weird because it let me watch Pasolini's Arabian Nights the other week, which you can't get on DVD in America. Why? Maybe because a guy shoots a girl's vagina with a penis-arrow. Or, more likely, because it's long and draggy, the acting's bad and it looks like it was dubbed into Italian by a 5th-grader.



I don't mind the dragginess and all that because over-all, I really love how Pasolini adapts classic texts in a way that is true to the gritty, unsanitised realism of the time they were written. He finds romanticism in the actual grime and dirt of the era, which is really refreshing to me. It feels truer to the stories. He also purely seems to be interested in the stories from the classics that deal with sex, which can be fun when it's done right (The Decameron), disturbing when it's done right (Salo) or just kind of boring (Arabian Nights). Apparently his Canterbury Tales adaptation is nothing to write home about, either, but, after I finish reading it I'm going to rent it (on VHS in the States, unfortunately).
Even if the rest is boring, this scene from Hell is pretty promisingly bonkers:




Thank you, Pierre Paulo Pasolini, Now I've seen it ALL! Wah wah. Ba dum dum.

For similar entertainment of a more painful nature, a bunch of high school English classes put up video adaptations of noted slag "The Wife of Bath's Tale." They're all bizarre, but I'm not going to post them here because I know almost no one else cares. If you're a video masochist like me, though, and you want to see exactly what's wrong with the youth of the nation you might enjoy:

• The version shot in night-vision where a guy tells the young filmmakers that women in the ghetto most desire crack (1:50)
  
• The vulgar Southern students version feat. flying Bush and Kerry heads, armored basebal caps, general misogyny
• The version with a kid beating a girl with a baseball bat for calling him a "silly goose" to "When a Man Loves a Woman."
• The version with a "Hey Ya" dance scene. PS - please go to 1:48 to see mom make an appearance; it's the best part. I'm serious, you won't regret it.
• The version where a girl on a broomstick rapes another girl and literally tears up her "V-card." Also a girl says she desires a man that will let her fart in bed without judging her. Go to 4:35 to see marital discord at it's most harrowing.
  
• Or might I interest you a boy raping a dog in a wig that talks like Betty Boop.

It really just keeps going and going. It's funny how simultaneously amusing and depressing this kind of thing is.
You know what's more depressing? The fact that I have 350 pages of The Way We Live Now to read by Tuesday morning and I spent over half and hour watching films by high school kids. My priorities are all messed up.

Hey Dave, what's going on? Nothing.

There's still not much to update about.
I have a cough that won't go away. Apparently it's classified as a "tickly cough," as opposed to a "chest cough." This means that instead of cough drops or something I'm taking Veno's tickly coughs solution, which is a mix of honey, lemon and menthol (and magic). It's pretty foul.

This is my week off, or "reading week," and I had originally planned to go somewhere, but now I think I'm actually going to read. I have four days off every week to take a day trip or something and this is pretty nice just catching up. I finally finished Great Suckspectations and now I need to finish the last story in Cranford before delving into The Way We Live Now again. Oh, and my other two classes.

That's about it. What will make this blog update more riviting than it already is? How about videos.


It's hard to debate Keith Olbermann's annoyingness, but here he pretty much hits the nail on the head. Unfortunately, anyone he's actually preaching to probably changed the channel pretty quick.




And hey, this is pretty neat:

Land of the empire builders, murderers

"Some people did not quite believe that there ever had been a Mr Hurtle. Others said that there certainly had been a Mr Hurtle and that to the best of their belief he still existed. The fact, however, best known of her was, that she had shot a man through the head somewhere in Oregon. She had not been tried for it, as the world of Oregon had considered that the circumstances justified the deed."

-Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

"I'm a bookkeeper's son/ I don't wanna hurt no one/ I crossed my old man back in Oregon/ don't take me alive./ Got a case of dynamite/ I could hold out here all night/ I crossed my old man back in Oregon/ don't take me alive.

- Steely Dan,"Don't Take Me Alive"