Finally!

Everything that is wrong with The Da Vinci Code.

With its flat prose, stick-figure characters, wooden dialogue, perfunctory scene-setting and an unfortunate tendency to interrupt the action with momentum-killing lectures, the novel is in some ways the unlikeliest of best sellers. Many Chicago writers, critics, scholars and book-industry insiders are flummoxed by the book's success.

I AM: a little more tired than I'll let on.
I WANT: more than I can sometimes have.
I WISH: that wishing made it so.
I HATE: being afraid.
I MISS: New Mexico thunderstorms.
I FEAR: what is said when I'm not listening.
I HEAR: the negative thoughts a little too loudly.
I WONDER: if I'll ever have time to do everything I want to do.
I REGRET: not trying harder.
I AM NOT: going to live anyone's life but my own.
I DANCE: anywhere and any time.
I SING: when I'm absolutely certain no one is listening.
I CRY: only as a last resort.
I AM NOT ALWAYS: as cheerful as I seem.
I MAKE WITH MY HANDS: small knitted gifts.
I WRITE: not nearly as much as I should.
I CONFUSE: my family. greatly.
I NEED: a little quiet now and then.
I SHOULD: floss regularly. wear sunscreen. drink milk.
I START: too many projects at once.
I FINISH: less than I should.
I TAG: koobeto, la_directora, hangingfire, gemini621rn, nasium or anyone else who is interested.

Current Mood: contemplative

Elle Woods takes Manhattan.

The musical adaptation is just the latest in an increasing line of hit films hoofing it over to Broadway. Most recently, High Fidelity and The Wedding Singer have both been prepping for their Broadway debuts. But the influx of Hollywood to Broadway is nothing new. In 2002, inspired by Broadway's then reigning megahits The Lion King and The Producers, MGM announced plans to dig through its vaults and some of their own films to adapt to the stage.

Don't get me wrong, I love Legally Blonde. I admit that it is not only in my DVD collection, but it got me through the worst days of grad school. It's a fun film, but Broadway? Really?

Sigh...

Current Mood: grumpy

Long, but worth the read: The Worst President in History? from Rolling Stone

Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush.

First, it should be noted that I got no sleep for the week preceeding the New York Trip. Seriously, none. Blame Daylight Savings, blame anxiety, blame TC's lounge and Seth Walker blues, blame my ability to stay up until 3:30 a.m. and not even notice when I'm involved in deep, soul-searching conversation. Whatever is to blame, I was already sleep-deprived before I even got to the city.

( Thursday, April 6 - NYC on three hours of sleep )
( Friday, April 7 (morning) - penguins and seals and polar bears, oh my! )
( Friday, April 7 (afternoon) - Where's the cheese? [3] )
( Friday, April 7 (evening) - Nobody's smoking in Manhattan )
Part two, coming soon....

( Footnotes )

On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.

That won't ever happen again.

Just thought you'd like to know...

The talk all around me is all music and SXSW so I'm feeling the desperate need to believe that my life *is* cool and that I *am* an interesting person (even though I'm not even remotely interested in SXSW). Therefore I bring you... AWP Conference readings and parties!

*crickets chirping*

( Okay, humor me, people. )

( Spoiler for Grey's Anatomy ...As We Know It behind the cut. )

Current Mood: amused

Word from Fisher is that the Freescale marathon is going down tomorrow, rain or shine. If any of you are brave enough to bear the weater/traffic/time to come to the corner of Lawnmont and Shoal Creek you will be rewarded with breakfast and coffee. I'll be out at the race site (about two blocks away) from about 8 to 9. If you want to drop by later, I suggest calling first. And don't forget that streets are closed due to this thing. Check your route before heading over here.

The Johari Window was invented by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingram in the 1950s as a model for mapping personality awareness. By describing yourself from a fixed list of adjectives, then asking your friends and colleagues to describe you from the same list, a grid of overlap and difference can be built up.

Help me fill out my johari window. 

Today I am catching up on housekeeping - laundry, bills, those hard to clean bathroom corners. So might as well tidy up the book list to date as well.

8/50 P.S. by Helen Schulman
Rating: 4/5
Obligatory summary: Louise Harrington, a thirty-something divorcee, believes that she has only loved one man - her bad-boy boyfriend who died 20 years ago after breaking up with Louise for her best friend. When she comes across a boy with the same name and face as her ex-lover, she begins to wonder if she's being given a second chance with her love. That would be the chicklit focused summary of the book, should it be reprinted with a new pink and frilly cover. In fact the book isn't chicklit at all. It doesn't question whether Louise will find true love, but rather explores the character that holds so tightly to a man she lost as an adolescent. That's the part worth reading the book for. The story and character study is compelling, if not profound.

Unfortunately, I saw the movie version before I read the novel. For me to really enjoy a book-movie combination, the book has to supplement the movie in a way that I didn't expect. The only book that did this really well is The Last Days of Disco, With Cockatils at the Petrossian Afterwards by Whit Stillman. P.S., the book offered up just a little bit more than the movie, but not enough to make me suggest reading the book over seeing the movie.

9/50 Tumble Home by Amy Hempel
Rating: 3/5
One of my favorite descriptions of Hempel's writing is that in her stories, nothing much happens, yet everything changes. I'm going to use that description as my out for not writing a summary and going straight to my reaction to the collections. Hempel's collection Reasons to Live contains some of the best contemporary short stories I've read. However, Tumble Home is another homage to the MFA adage: I've learned to appreciate that which I do not enjoy. I like her language and the quiet, somber mood of her stories in the collection, but I didn't enjoy them. I'm in a stage where I read more for character than for anything else and I didn't feel like I got to know any of the characters in this collection of stories. Everyone else seems to love her, though, so maybe I just don't have good taste...

__________

At this rate, it's looking like I'm not going to make my goal. Unfortunately, I'm hitting another multi-tasking phase where I am working on three thick books at once while also juggling a book about writing and my reading for class. Argh! If you don't hear from me for a bit, there's a good chance that the pile of books next to my bed has toppled over and suffocated me.

I'm terribly bored for the moment and I think my friends are getting a little tired of me pestering them on IM so I'll go on and write the weekly book update. It may be a little early, but I'm willing to bet nothing else will get completed over the weekend. (After all, I have homework to do.)

( Week 4 behind cut )

(As if I needed more.)

Joss Whedon eyes the future of TV

A sampling:

In a stunningly cost-effective move, CBS will air How I Met Your Biological Mother, That Bitch, which is just old episodes of How I Met Your Mother with snarkier narration. HBO's Westminster will continue the trend pioneered by Deadwood and Rome by making 19th-century England really dirty and weird, like Jane Austen with Tourette's. (Actually, I can't wait for that one.) Also, the constant slew of cable mergers will result in the creation of CinePax, a channel that's just very confused about its morals.

On my way to work this morning, I got a call from someone in the UT Extension Registrar's office. She needed to verify that I had completed the pre-reqs to take the creative writing class. Because I hadn't specified what I had an MFA degree in, there was some confusion over whether I could take the course. It came down to her asking whether I'd taken freshman composition in the last eight years. Sadly, the answer was no, but I've taught freshman comp in the last eight years. She seemed to think that would count.

In further proof that my nerddom knows no boundaries, I went by the library and picked up a book that had some of the last class's reading material in it. I am way to excited about taking classes again. Aren't most 30 year-olds glad to be out of school?

I'm going back to school!

Okay, not really, but I am taking a class through UT Extension. I've signed up for a a fiction writing course and this entry of nasium's is to blame for it. After reading that and then seeing the reading list, I suddenly really missed the classroom. And for a long time I've missed having a group to talk with about writing. The idea percolated all afternoon. Then I came home and called my mom and let the idea slip about taking a class and she was actually really receptive to it. And I started getting really excited about taking a class again and then next thing I knew, my credit card was out and I was registering. So.. I'm taking a class again! Yay!

Oh my god.

I have reading to do.

I have homework.

YAY!!!

 

4/50 The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis
Rating: 2/5
5/50 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Rating: 4/5
I never read the entire Narnia Chronicles as a child.  I read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe which was the basis for most of my Christian beliefs [1] and a childhood favorite. However, I didn't go near the rest of the Narnia books. Now, I'm kind of glad I didn't. In fact, I may just try to put The Magician's Nephew out of my mind. It was boring. It was way too slow in the beginning and, as one of my writing professors would put it, "there's too much going on here." It felt like a prequel and seemed to contain all the flaws of prequels that are written after the original story: it told too much, its path was too predictable, it left little room for surprise. About the one thing I appreciated about TMN, was that Lewis was a little more relaxed about writing mean kids. I read LWW to get rid of the bad taste left by TMN. It's a favorite for sentimental reasons. Also - best Jesus cat EVER. 

6/50 The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
Rating: 3/5
If there was any one thing that made me wish that I was taking lit classes again, it's reading important books that I need to talk about. Such is The Ghost Writer. I enjoyed this book, but I'm not quite sure why yet. There are the obvious reasons: Nathan Zuckerman is ostracized by his family for writing a short story that embarrasses his father. Hmm.. sound a little familiar? It gets better. In the scene at the bus stop, the father tells Nathan, he is 'not the kind of person who writes these stories.' Oh my. If the book hadn't been written when I was four years old, I'd swear Roth was hanging out in our laundry room the weekend I brought my thesis collection home to my parents. At this point I had to resist finding Roth's address and penning one of those "I am so glad I'm not alone" missives. I'm sure he's already received thousands. Obviously, where the book spoke to me was in the relationship between family and writer and the struggle for validation. There's so much more to it, though, and for that reason I really wish this had been assigned reading. *sigh* I miss school...


[1] FWIW, I honestly wonder if the reason I haven't completely given up faith is that I can't shake the image of Jesus/God as a big, cuddly kitty.

Whit Smith and the Hot Jazz Caravan at the Continental Club, 3 p.m., Saturday. No cover!

This just goes to show that once again, you can't impress the desert rat. We've seen everything. Rattlesnakes live in our backyard. Tarantualas die on our front porches. Scorpions and centepedes are everyday house pests. And undiscovered species of psuedo-scorpions ... well, those are all over our walls.

My former roommate emailed me the linked article above. The article says those nasty buggers  live in caves, but they look remarkably similar to the weird tail-less scorpion things that took up residence in my Las Cruces house. Our landlord called them "Children of the Earth." I called them things which are fugly and deserve to die.