Episode 1205: The Library Caves (Well, Sort Of)

Got an e-mail from the Library's Customer Service Manager, so it seems that all that grousing has finally been acknowledged by someone. For a change, here was someone actually acknowledging that there was a problem with how the recall system currently functions approaching vacation periods, as well as noting that obtaining another copy of the book for the Library is being considered, although I don't know why she assumed that my fine had been waived. I actually paid it the same day that I returned the overdue book, though I wouldn't mind if the Library decided to reimburse me. (I'm sure if anyone can make that happen even after I've paid it, it'll be the Customer Service Manager!) Have made progress with the essay, although I thought I wasn't going to get anything done after my decision to have a late afternoon nap. Am now a third of the way through, and the biggest challenge right now is holding the big picture in my mind. It's like every time I open one of the books or articles I've found in the course of my research, I find a piece that adds to the puzzle that I'd forgotten about, and so it all just keeps expanding in scope. I worry that too much of my discussion is going to end up wandering away from my original thesis statement, although I definitely have a core train of thought already that ties together a fair bit of my research. It's just a matter of whether more stuff can be added to it that further develops what I'm already going to be saying anyway.

Episode 1204: Take A Break?

Haven't touched my essay today, but I'm citing jet lag as an excuse. Hasn't stopped me from finishing a poem that emerged out of a workshop exercise during this morning's EN911 seminar (where I also happened to be the only guy in a class of women). Might try to finish the riddle we're meant to write as 'homework', and then see if I can't take a crack at finishing another paragraph of the essay at least. Even if I don't though, I can afford to take today off entirely and still will only need to write 700+ words every day till Sunday, which seems perfectly reasonable, even with TV as a distraction. Case in point: I watched six shows today and yet I've managed to write a poem, haven't I? One of the shows was the double-episode premiere of The Firm, set a decade after the Tom Cruise movie adaptation of John Grisham's novel. Ah, the days of primary school when I'd first started reading novels and was really into Grisham (and Robin Cook)! Haven't kept up with his more recent output (i.e. since secondary school, pretty much), but I really did love the early novels, and The Firm was among my favourites. Anyway, the premiere was a bit slow-moving, although the ending was enough to keep me tuning in, so I guess I'll add this to my list of shows to follow as they air. Also saw House Of Lies, which didn't really grab me, so I'll give it one or two more episodes to improve, and if it doesn't, I'll get the episodes but save them for that day (which will never come) when I completely run out of TV shows to watch.

Episode 1203: >25%

Despite being jetlagged and not having slept properly for nearly two days by this point (the price of taking night flights from Singapore that last half a day and landing in the early morning in London), I've managed to push my essay past 25% of the word count. The argument feels like it's beginning to propel itself forward, so with any luck, the writing will continue to proceed at this steady pace, if not faster. I feel like my style in this essay is a lot more self-assured and assertive, partly because I've quoted sparingly so far from critical literature (and that's partly because there's not a lot of it on Eunoia), so a lot of what I've written so far (and probably will be writing) is close reading (so obviously mostly in my own words anyway) and conclusions I'm drawing from that (so specific points are in my words, backed up by more general quotes dealing with sound poetry). It's pretty amazing that I'm still excited and motivated to write this essay, whereas in my undergraduate days, by now I'd be just looking for quotes to stitch together to fit a conclusion that I probably derived from modifying another quote, assuming I'd even bothered spending this many days on the essay. Looking back, I'm slightly embarrassed to say that I was a pretty lax undergraduate, who was happy to play the system to his benefit (i.e. taking Language Centre modules for credit). In hindsight, going to a small liberal arts college in the USA, or even one of the Ivy League universities, would probably have been a massive wakeup call.

Episode 1202: Four Films

Saw four films during this flight, all starring actors about which there have been considerable buzz in Tinseltown in recent years. Started off with The Change-Up, which was funny enough, although ultimately quite forgettable. Ryan Reynolds has never struck me as being a fantastic actor, although I think it's hilarious that his first big break was actually his TV role on Two Guys And A Girl and now he's a movie star. Jason Bateman's character was more interesting, but overall, this film felt like the sort of heartwarming narrative with a neatly packaged moral that Hollywood has churned out many times before. What's Your Number?, starring Chris Evans's six-pack opposite Anna Faris, was more entertaining, but again, pretty formulaic. The twist in the last minute of the show was the sort of thing that's bound to leave cinemagoers grinning in approval or smirking at its inanity. Now Crazy, Stupid, Love, with Steve Carrell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, and Emma Stone, that I enjoyed very much. Still has a clear ready-made moral in its tale, and I really think Carrell's totally being typecast, but Gosling and Stone? Love them. Loved her performance in Easy A, and she's quirkily attractive, rather than being your typical blonde beauty. As for Gosling, I now genuinely think he's one of the best actors of his generation. Never paid much attention to his work before, but he's had a string of films out in 2011, so it's been hard not to notice him now. Same goes for Olivia Wilde, appearing with Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford in Cowboys & Aliens. I think Craig's a solid actor, although I still don't buy him as James Bond, and who doesn't love Ford (even if his dating and marrying Calista Flockhart was really random)? Wilde, on the other hand, keeps getting shoved down our throats in a series of performances (Tron: Legacy, The Change-Up) where she doesn't really have to do much acting, does she? Pretty sure her role in In Time isn't that important either, since Amanda Seyfried's the female star of that vehicle. Wilde never feels like she's one of the leads, even when she must be because she shares top billing. I get that she's this luminous, big-eyed beauty. Everyone must have noticed that when she first appeared on House. Like Stone, not one cast from the usual blonde mould. Unlike Gosling though, whose performances justify being watched, Wilde just seems like she's in danger of being overexposed as a starlet, in a string of insignificant parts in blockbuster films.

Episode 1201: New Day, New Discovery

The more I work on this essay, the more I discover things to write about that I hadn't thought about before. Specifically, while writing out the close reading portion I mentioned yesterday, I started looking into the origins of the character of Ubu. Turns out someone's written an article about Alfred Jarry's cycle of plays from which the character originates, advancing an interpretation that can be adapted to address a niggling gap in my own essay. It does mean having to rejiggle the bit that I'm currently writing, although I think it's for the better this way. The broader picture the essay is trying to paint should eventually be more coherent, emerging naturally from this initial close reading of the opening pages of Eunoia's five chapters. What I've got to do now is figure out exactly what I'm going to say at this point, as I have various ideas that I want to put in and that I know can be made to fit together, just better in some ways than others. It's a question of moving from tiny details in the text to a wider theoretical perspective, but not losing sight of the need to constantly return to those details in order to back up all the theorising. There's so much going on in Eunoia that it's hopeless to try and cover all of it in a 6000-word essay. I mean, Bök took seven years to write it, so I really doubt seven days is going to cover it for an analysis. What I need to do is pick and choose examples that prove my thesis, which shouldn't be that hard. You could literally pick a page at random, and something in that paragraph could be used as an argument in support of my thesis statement.

Episode 1200: More Essay Progress...

I think I've figured out how to proceed after the introductory paragraph, in the sense of what the flow of my argument needs to be in order to cover all the ground that I want to by the end of the essay. I've had to tweak the introduction a little, although it's still quite jargon-free when it comes to the actual thesis statement. I've made peace with that though. Now it's how to fit in this huge chunk of quotes from the poem itself. I was going to just dump them in one chunk and then proceed with the close reading for this portion of the essay from there, but it's been pointed out to me that that's quite inelegant. I'm going to leave it for now and write out the close reading bits tomorrow, and then see if I can splice the quotes in more naturally. I'm sure it's possible, just that it's more expedient to go about it the way I'm doing. Would stay up tonight to write more, since I find it a lot easier to just do straightforward close reading as opposed to trying to situate stuff within a wider theoretical framework (although I have one in mind for the essay too), but I've got a bit of a headache. Probably, ironically, from staring at the laptop screen for so long.

Episode 1199: Are You Kidding?

Dear Library of the University of Warwick, you have to be joking. How can you have a staff member reply to my e-mail one day, incidentally not acknowledging the issue I've consistently raised in my repeated correspondence, which is that I'm not even in the country so it's logistically impossible to return the overdue book, and then allow an automated notice to be sent the next threatening to send me an invoice for a replacement copy? An appropriately snarky e-mail has been sent in reply, in which I politely request acknowledgement of this reply and state in advance that I will dispute any attempt to charge me for a replacement. It would be pretty remarkable if they tried to do that, since the notice says that they will do so if I don't contact the Library within seven days of the notice's date, but the book will have been returned before a week has gone by. I wouldn't put it past them though, to somehow fail to stop the invoice from going out. After all, apparently e-mails to and from multiple staff members aren't enough to qualify as having been in contact with the Library in order to prevent the pre-invoice from being sent out, so why would a little thing like the book in question already having been returned stop them from extracting money from me to buy another copy? The ultimate irony, of course, is that this copy of the book is only in the Library system because I requested it to be bought, thinking it curious that the Library had failed to stock a copy of a book written by a member of staff that had already been out for a couple of months.

Episode 1198: Christian Bö(o)k

The most interesting bit of trivia I've discovered in the course of reading for my essay is that Christian Bök was actually born Christian Book! Understandably, he changed the spelling to avoid the inevitable ribbing, although seeing as the pronunciation has presumably been kept the same, I don't see that much has been gained. (I'll concede that Bök does look more striking on a book spine and in general though.) The introductory paragraph is starting to take shape in my head, and I think I'm not going to begin with that excellent quote I was set on a few days ago. In fact, it's probably going to pop up either in the middle of the essay, or right at the very end. I continue to feel optimistic about my progress, especially having read a few more essays by and interviews of Bök himself, whose own critical comments are surprisingly helpful in interpreting his creative output, which isn't always the case with poets. On a tangential note, I've been getting a steady stream of submissions for Eunoia Review lately, and the buffer of scheduled submissions is now extending into a fourth month. The geographic distribution of the writers submitting also seems to be widening, so hopefully this will have a domino effect in terms of broadening the readership of the journal.

Episode 1197: So This Is What It Feels Like...

Okay, I think now I'm ready to write this essay on Eunoia. I've got ideas that I didn't even have when I first picked Bök's long poem as my subject for discussion, so I'd say that's a good sign. Plus it seems likely that they can be integrated into a coherent, reasonably sophisticated argument concerning the poem that I haven't seen advanced so far in any of the secondary reading that I've done. (Probably because nobody's really writing about this kind of poems, other than the people who write them in the first place.) So this is what it feels like to have an original thought, academically speaking, as opposed to my undergraduate technique of cobbling together quotes from various critics in the service of a thesis that wasn't necessarily novel. Or as novel as one can be when writing about canonical works that have been discussed for decades/centuries. Not that it can't be done, clearly. My fellow students who did pull it off were getting the better Firsts like 89 and 96, whilst my technique of bricolage usually netted a safe but boring low First 74. While it remains to be seen if this essay I'm going to write (eventually) is going to be as great as I think it ought to be, at least I'd be messing up something that I thought up fairly independently this time.

Episode 1196: ...Welcome 2012

Might have read more today for my essay that's due in Week 2 of Spring Term than during the rest of the holidays put together. Wise decision though, as I've got more ideas in my head for it than I had before, and I don't feel as restricted by my self-created essay title as I did previously. I might even go so far as to say that I could stop reading and start writing at this point, although I might give myself till Wednesday before actually trying to get that all-important (for me) first sentence down onto the page. Want to read Eunoia for a third time, to see if an idea that came to me yesterday about sounds in the poem actually bears out. If it does, it'll be a step in the right direction in terms of the central argument I want to advance in this essay. I'm actually quite proud of myself that I'm preparing to knuckle down a fortnight before the essay's due. 6000 words is twice the length of what I normally wrote during my undergraduate days, and back then, I barely even read most of the articles and books I was quoting from. I also wrote most of the essays in the 24-48 hours before they were due, so getting ready two weeks in advance is a pretty major achievement. Hopefully, I should be able to have at least 1500 words done before I fly back. (To expect myself to have written half of it is, quite frankly, insanity.)