Episode 1146: Hat Trick!

How disorganised do you have to be to acknowledge my rejection e-mail, and a few days later, e-mail me saying that regretfully you have to withdraw your submission? If I wasn't receiving this e-mail in my capacity as an editor, you bet I'd have fired off a snarky reply pointing out the complete redundancy of the withdrawal. In a related incident, while I was getting my haircut, in an attempt to make conversation (as you do) the woman asked me if I was going out tonight. Except she asked me twice, less than five minutes apart, and this despite having received a fairly comprehensive reply the first time. So I guess she just wasn't listening the first time? To be fair, I doubt anybody wants to hear me talk about the extra reading I have to do over the weekend so that I don't turn up utterly clueless to a seminar that I'm only auditing for one week. I've finished one article so far, and that was Fredric Jameson's 'Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism'. I thought it was really interesting stuff, and ironically, made me want to read Lu Xun. In the original Chinese, no less. (This makes sense once you've read the article, so just go with me on this.) Six more readings to go now! I should have enough time to get through them all, but realistically, with my talent for procrastination, that's probably not going to happen. On the other hand, I've read three out of six issues of Popshot Magazine so far, and another five chapters of Caged: Memoirs Of A Cage-Fighting Poet. My thoughts for the review of the latter are more or less in place, but I'm going to get through the remainder because I like Cameron Conaway's writing.