Episode 799: It Did, But Not Enough!

The title about says it all. There was a point about 10 minutes before the seminar was due to begin when the half a dozen of us seated outside did wonder if we were going to be the only ones in attendance, but a couple more people showed up to bring us to a complete dozen. Meant to get a lot of reading done, of Mark Doty poems, but ended up finishing off the Editor's Highlights from the three issues of The Economist on my iPhone. I'm going to be so smart and knowledgeable in a couple of weeks! I did do the supplementary reading for next week's EN301 seminar as well, although I can't say that I fully understood it. Anyway, I'm watching the new Gossip Girl now, and honestly, by this point, the show's basically jumping the shark on a regular basis, but precisely because of that pattern, everything all makes a kind of weird, only-in-television sense. It's completely barmy, of course, but still fun to watch. I'm not sure if I fully approve of Juliet's sudden descent into psychotic-bitch mode, especially since it means her tenure on the show is definitely going to be limited. Really, a better decision would have been to bench Jenny for good and bring Juliet on as her replacement, to switch up the dynamics on the show a bit more. (Jenny would be less annoying if the writers could actually make up their minds about how they wanted to characterise her.)

Episode 798: Will It Snow Tomorrow?

Have only just finished reading The Jew Of Malta, so there's no point trying to re-read The Merchant Of Venice at this hour. Sleep is definitely more important. In any case, I've done the preparation for the seminar and picked out two scenes from each play to illustrate the debate position I'm meant to be taking. Even so, my favourite take on the whole anti-Semitism issue in these two plays has to be from this review of a Marlowe/Shakespeare double bill. It's really just the syntactical parallelism of 'Yes, but...' and 'Yes, and...' that gets me. I'm a complete sucker for stuff like that. Not looking forward to having to read both Doctor Faustus and Macbeth for next week though! Won't try too hard if the seminar doesn't call for much textual knowledge. Was quite amused by Tom Cornford's passive-aggressive e-mail about tardiness, by the way. It's a little sad that a tutor has to send that sort of e-mail, since you'd think students would know better and aim to arrive on time despite the weather. Given that snow has apparently been forecasted for tomorrow though, perhaps it'll be so bad (or not really, as it doesn't take much for things to grind to a halt in the UK) that nobody will be able to make it to the seminar! One can live in hope...

Episode 797: An Unnecessary Epiphany

Have been filling up my iPhone with more applications, particularly literature-related ones, the most substantial of these being the one for Narrative Magazine. I even found one in French, although it seems more like a prototype for a fuller product than anything else. My iPhone, like my personal library, is more aspirational than anything else. I have more than 400 applications on it, a fraction of which I use on anything that resembles a regular basis, but I keep them because they were free. Loads of them are games, and I'll probably start deleting them when I run out of space for stuff that I actually want on my iPhone. I suppose the truly scary thing is that I can't imagine life without my iPhone, kind of like how I can't imagine listening to music without my iPod anymore. Curse you, Apple! It's like there's no going back, once you cross to the dark side of owning a smartphone. (I don't think the N95 really counted, since compared to the smartphones of today, it might as well be virtually unrecognisable.) To return to more prosaic matters, I think I need to spend some time in the Library again tomorrow, like I did last week, once again scrambling to finish reading a Marlowe play. Sigh. I hope The Jew Of Malta turns out to be more interesting than Tamburlaine The Great was...

Episode 796: I Wish I Were Jewish And Reading These Plays...

So I've just finished my review of Jonathan Raban's Driving Home: An American Scrapbook. Didn't manage to read the whole thing because I'd put off getting started for too long, but I did get through about 200 pages out of 500+, which was more than enough for me to highly recommend it. Curiously, I got a lot out of Raban's own introduction to the volume, in the sense that it was easy to read the subsequent pieces against Raban's expressed beliefs and influences and see how these were reflected in his writing, a point that I think I came close to belabouring in my review. We'll see if my editor has anything to say about that. Now reading The Jew Of Malta, although I'm not sure how hard I should try to finish it, since Tuesday's seminar really sounds like I could get away with just doing research on Google Scholar, and only then reading the relevant scenes. We'll see if I can finish it by tomorrow, since I've got to re-read The Merchant Of Venice, which has always been one of my favourite Shakespearean plays. At one point, I used to be able to recite both Portia's speech on mercy and Shylock's speech about being a Jew. It's mostly gone now, but it's nice to think that there was a time in my life when I cared enough to commit stuff to memory.

Episode 795: McSweeney's Black Friday Sale!

McSweeney's is offering their iPhone application at a steep discount as part of Black Friday sales. It costs only £0.59 to purchase it, including a 180-day subscription. Renewals of this can also be purchased for the same price. I think it's a pretty fantastic deal, especially if like me, you can't afford quite afford to commit to subscribing to the print magazine itself. (Though I still cherish hopes of doing so eventually!) The in-application material comes from the four publications under the McSweeney's grouping: Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Wholphin, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency. It's an incredibly generous sale offer, so if you've got an iPhone, it's definitely worth getting the application. I suppose the caveat is that you've got to like McSweeney's output in general to begin with! Am now watching Julie Taymor's 'Titus', and I must say, that Lavinia post-rape scene when Marcus Andronicus discovers her is possibly one of the most horrifying things I've ever seen. Watching it, I can also completely understand what Carol Rutter meant when she said that seeing the film was enough to make her lecture redundant. Highly recommend viewing it for the sheer density of its imagery and symbolism.

Episode 794: Barcelona, Here We Come!

Flight tickets and hostel for Barcelona sorted by Yong Long! I've booked my train tickets to get to the airport as well. Also bought my return ticket for the Christmas holidays, but haven't got around to getting the corresponding tickets for transport to Heathrow because I can't decide if I'll need the coach or can I cope with lugging stuff around on the train and the Tube. For a change, I could probably do the latter, since I'm only planning to bring one suitcase back, assuming the books to be carted back will fit along with my clothes. Should probably try packing next week! The thing is, it's a lot cheaper to go by train than coach. Like 90%? Anyway, Michael Hulse thinks the language of the poems I've written so far can afford to be tweaked so that it doesn't sound so stiff, which is a problem I'd sort of anticipated even as I was writing them. Basically, I'm writing in the wrong century, when we don't go in for heavy rhetorical flourishes anymore. Oh well. Hopefully, I'll revise these at some point, and hopefully, the next group of poems won't present as much of a problem, seeing as there's actually very little material I can lift directly from the KJV for them, which will definitely help with not getting bogged down by archaisms.

Episode 793: ACCR Occupied!

Pretty much wrote the third poem on the bus journey to cell, so I'm all set for my meeting with Michael Hulse tomorrow afternoon. I'm quite pleased with it for a first draft, as it contains a pair of lines that represent a pun which I think wouldn't be amiss in a Shakespearean play. I know, such a lofty claim! I'm hoping that the pun actually works and it wasn't just all in my head. Incidentally, I was there when the Conference Room in the Arts Centre got occupied by student protesters. While I applaud their desire to take a stand against the cuts, I personally find their list of demands to be somewhat naïve. The post on their WordPress blog states that they 'consider these demands to be fair and reasonable, and would appreciate a quick response'. I would suggest that it is irrelevant how they view their demands, given that the power structure in which they're operating is weighted in favour of the university. You might say that's the problem, but I somehow doubt that a protest will achieve anything significant that couldn't have been reached by a less openly confrontational approach.

I also (mildly) take issue with their signing off as 'Students of the University of Warwick', as if they somehow spoke for a wide section of the student body. The BBC reports more than 70 students as being involved, which is a paltry number in comparison to how many students there are at Warwick. It's worth pointing out that when they occupied the ACCR, our EN301 lecture had just finished and people were leaving. Despite their exhortations, I didn't witness droves of people rushing to stay behind with them. I for one was rather discomfited. As someone who believes that university education is not some sort of right to be claimed willy-nilly (for it is certain that there are people who do not desire to go to university) and believes that fees need to rise, the protesters do not speak for me and never have. As an international student, who indirectly cross-subsidises local students by paying thrice as much in fees to begin with, I also think the burden of the cost of education needs to be distributed more evenly. Basically, why am I indirectly paying for so many of you to get hammered on a regular basis? (The argument that fees elsewhere in Europe are lower is wilfully ignoring the fact that other European countries aren't in fact replicas of Britain, and perhaps, I don't know, their governments just had better long-term planning.) Oh, but I've forgotten. We're trying to keep foreigners out of the UK system, aren't we? How ironic.

Episode 792: Finally Wrote Something For My PWP!

Tried to work on my PWP in the Library, but that didn't work out too well. Guess I am really not a pen-and-paper kind of writer. Give me a keyboard and a word processor any day! Came home after band practice and banged out the first poem of 30. Am trying to finish a bit more of the second poem, especially because I already have an idea for the ending. It's just the middle bits that are missing! I'm worried that the language of the poems is going to end up being too archaic, although given the subject matter, it's somewhat excusable, I suppose. Should probably discuss this with Michael Hulse when I meet him on Thursday. In a way, I'm using this first trio of poems to test if I'm going far enough in the right direction, as far as what I want to do with my PWP is concerned. I've also picked the full list of 30 Biblical figures that I want to write about, so that should keep me going, especially over the Christmas vacation. Also somewhat frantically trying to read Driving Home: An American Scrapbook. No matter what, I'm going to finish at least the title essay before I turn in for the night. Less than 40 pages to go! Plus Raban's prose is very readable, a point that I'm sure to note in my review.

Episode 791: Mocking Up CV And Cover Letter...In French

Sat in the Library after the EN301 lecture and just read Titus Andronicus. Pretty pleased that I actually managed to finish it in one sitting. Man, talk about a heavy first scene! Anyway, the lecture on Tamburlaine The Great did go some way towards changing my mind about Marlowe. Was hoping to finally read more of that Jonathan Raban book that I need to turn in my review of in a week, or maybe finally write something for my PWP instead of just thinking about it, but all such plans were derailed by my attempts to finish my French homework, which consisted of putting together a CV and writing a cover letter. The trouble was finding a job advertisement that I a) understood and b) qualified for. In the end, I just gave up and wrote one asking for an internship at Hachette Livre. Can't imagine that they'd actually give one to me based on what I've handed in, but hey, whatever gets the homework done. Guess I'll write a poem between my seminar and band practice. I could come home, but I'd probably get more done on campus without my laptop and easy Internet access. (It's quite a pain to have to log onto the campus WiFi every time I want to do something on my iPhone that requires an Internet connection.) Perhaps there's still time to read a bit of Driving Home: An American Scrapbook after all...

Episode 790: One Play Down, One To Go

Am almost done with Tamburlaine The Great, after which I shall try to make a start on Titus Andronicus. I will say that Marlowe's play feels kind of flat compared to the complexities in Shakespearean plays. I'm hoping that Tony Howard's lecture tomorrow will help me to gain some insight into it. On the other hand, I've happily figured out what I want to do for my EN301 creative project. This happened because I missed the first evening U1 after service, so I went to the Library for the warmth. Got to looking up articles on Google Scholar, and I think I've narrowed my area of interest down to Shakespeare's comedies. What I'm going to focus on are the characters for whom the endings seem particularly problematic in terms of unresolved issues, explicit or implied, and the creative project itself is going to be a series of dramatic monologues addressing these issues. If it doesn't work out, I'm pretty sure I can find enough material for an essay anyway, so it should all work out fine whichever way I choose to fulfil the assessment. Right?