Below are the 6 most recent journal entries recorded in Emily the Strange's LiveJournal:

Sunday, June 8th, 2003
6:29 pm	back again First entry in months, I guess. I've spent the ENTIRE day finishing Robin Hobbs' Liveship Traders trilogy. They're good, time-sucking books. I think part of the way she does that is to have at least five different narratives running all at once and interweaving them. It makes for great fun until the very end when all of them have to come smashingly together in a plot climax that goes on for only 150 or so pages. Rather tiring, really. At the same time, the whole business with the dragons and Rain Wild Traders is just incredibly cool. I wish I could say that something productive has come out of my day but it really hasn't. I guess this is okay, since it's the summer. Last summer I sat down for a whole day and read Jane Eyre cover to cover. It left me with that same kind of foggy feeling where I want to say "Whaa?" when someone talks to me. I guess this is what I can look forward to when studying for exams. Whoopee! Except the books might be much more boring than either gothic romance or popular fantasy. Well, off to...um...take a walk? Or something, not sure what. Can't quite get back to the real world yet. Current Mood: restless (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 4th, 2003
8:36 pm	happy birthday to annie Very fun day today...Annie's surprise party featured Em going spastic right before the birthday girl arrived, practically hanging up on Marty, and Reid jumping out of a box. There was food galore and I just about popped, which was nice. HOWEVER it is now back to the real world and its accompanying strangeness. The Real World: Chaucer paper, grading, Chaucer paper, grading, and more Chaucer paper. Am slightly pissed as I finished grading a student's paper only to get an email from him saying that he turned in the wrong version of his paper. Do I not let him turn in the "newer" version, since I already spent a significant amount of time working on the other paper? Do I be lenient, and let him turn it in? Choices, choices. Onward. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 7th, 2003
12:08 pm	oy Sitting down to lunch and seeing an article sitting on my cubicle-mate's desk, I am reminded of some of the reasons why I'm thinking of leaving academia: Title: The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality. For a general sense of this writer, here's the first sentence: "To raise the question of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself." How frighteningly pretentious. How chocked full of Latinate words. How nauseating. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
10:09 am	strange things happening in my tummy I think I ate too much cheese last night... Yet another Monday after a weekend of doing absolutely NO work. It was lovely. Annie's house had no power and was something like 40 degrees last night, so she slept on the Longenbach-Scott super futon. It was like the slumber parties of olde. Discussed various matters like current creative writing projects that will take me years and years to finish. OY. Particularly whether or not to lift the Orpheus/Eurydice story and insert. Have not decided on that yet. Also haven't decided whether or not to kill the main character at the end. Another observation of humanity: on the pack of watermelon flavored bubble gum I bought last night, there is a warning that says: 'NOT FOR WEIGHT CONTROL'. The thing that is sad is that the warning is on there because you know some stupid person tried to use bubble gum for weight loss. Wow. And there is a large amount of yellow goo congealed on the floor in front of the french fry machine. Either some drunk person peed on the floory or the machine has begun to disintegrate on the inside. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 6th, 2003
1:02 pm	lest this puck a liar call Had a very interesting evening last night. I went with the Venerable Peck and Ruth, Annie, and Jen to Benjamin Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream at Eastmen. It was a student production, so some spots were not vastly impressive, but in general a pretty neat performance. Oberon and Titania had their kingdom in an almost post-apocalyptic urban world, where fragments of exxon and coca-cola signs are littering the streets along with twisted and burned pieces of sheet metal that under certain lighting looked like enormous fallen leaves. Titania's makeup was COOL. The whole top half of her face was painted in a sparkly green, and she had a jewel set on her forehead, right below a fabulous eighteenth centuryesque updo that almost looked too heavy for her neck. The whole fairy kingdom was definitely made up of what seemed like social outcasts rather than immortal Others; although they sang about mortals versus immortals. Oberon was played by an impressive if eerie countertenor dressed up to look like Boy George/goth vampire, who spent a rather large amount of time exchanging homoerotic caresses with Puck--by far the sexiest character in the production (Puck, I mean, not Boy George). I had never pictured a Goth Puck before, but they pulled it off pretty well. He was this incredibly skinny, half naked guy who leapt around onstage in a leather kilt and a dog collar. Hair black at the roots and the spiked tips were dyed red. Most of the time he was onstage he was in a green spotlight that made for a kind of fiendish look, which was pretty darn cool. On other notes, reading Guy Gavriel Kay's 'A Song for Arbonne.' It was kind of a struggle to put it down this morning and get in here to do some work (and you can see how hard I'm working right now, but it's okay because secretly while I'm writing this, brilliant thoughts about Chaucer's House of Fame are germinating in the back of my head). I like his novels in general--I like how he picks a historical place and time period (this novel its southern France in the age of the troubadours) and tweaks it to make it uniquely his own. 'Arbonne' lacks the supposedly mandatory "magic" that fantasy novels need, but too many fantasy novels mechanically fulfill the mandatory list of ingredients and end up being forced and boring, a la, Jordan, Eddings, de Lint, Donaldson, Bradley (although I guess she's more sci fi), the list goes on. The List: mandatory race of monster thingies, mandatory race of elfy thingies, evil gods, good gods, fairies living in urban worlds, righteous priestesses (*hack, puke*), spunky heroes/heroines, the list goes on and on. So far the only authors I've read that deal with the genre well are Kay, Patricia McKillip, and Ursula le Guin (but only in the first three books of Earthsea; I'm sorry, but Tehanu was lame). And even then--boy I'm really procrastinating from grading papers now--Kay has a sort of formula to his books. I like the formula, but it's still a formula. Well, I guess if Hemingway has a formula (which he does), then Kay can too. Kay's world is one of intricate politics (he does it the best in 'Lions of Al-Rassan') where high-powered people glance at each other and raise their eyebrows, while everybody else in the room goes, "Ooh! Something baaaad is going to happen now..." All of the characters are beautiful high class people (I can't criticize that, I read medieval romance for fun) who are all extremely intelligent with very subtle minds. There's always a tortured, victimized woman trying to right her life, a strong, independent woman who kicks a whole lot of ass, and a roguish, attractive, hilariously funny, skirt-chasing man that everybody loves, who usually ends up being the sacrifial red-shirt guy by the end of the book. The best version of this guy is Diarmuid in the Fionavar Tapestry. Oh, and a large portion of his books are also vaguely like soft porn. Hee hee. This is definitely something Tolkien didn't see coming with the new genre of "fantasy." (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, April 4th, 2003
3:15 pm	frozen in the frozen north In Chaucer, north is where the fiend comes from in the Friar's Tale. You can understand why medieval people thought the direction of hell was to the north, being in Rochester. There's a half-inch of ice covering everything in sight outside, from my car windshield wipers to the dog poop in the bag yard. It looks rather cool (the ice, not the dog poop)--as the trees all have knobbly arthritic knuckles and the power lines are hanging low from the weight of icicles. However, alas, the only school NOT to be closed in the city is the U of R. Class this morning was profoundly low key. I spent a rather large amount of time antagonizing H.C.S. (His Chauvinistic Self) with a crackpotted, completely bogus, uber-feminist interpretation of the Wife of Bath's Tale. Oy. Well, maybe not "uber" feminist. It's a rather surreal and tired day so far, but I think that's partly from the ice. Went to the cafeteria to get a soda and saw a guy I went on a date with a while ago staring open-mouthed at two people going nuts on the DDR. Just barely short of strings of drool hanging out of his mouth. Remind me to tighten the bolts on my chastity belt later on. I vaguely feel like, since this is a livejournal, I should post some kind of mandatory political or social commentary for people to read and comment on while nodding and/or stroking their chins thoughtfully. Alas, this is not to be. My consistent social comment is that all people have always been stupid and will continue to be stupid until we blow ourselves up or devolve into jiggling frog-spawn. (Many of us have already, to some extent, devolved into jiggling frog-spawn.) However, quae cum ita sint, let me share just a little thing I observed the other day. This was a rather strange student who appeared to be a little out there (clearly enough), kneeling in front of the McDonald's French Fry vending machine in the library, rocking back and forth with his hands clasped and whining "Why won't it give me the signal? It's taking so long!" It was quite a sad moment in the history of the human race, I thought, when the McDonald's vending machine becomes paramount to a divine power of sorts. I tried to calm the guy down by telling him that from what I'd seen, the little red blinky light would flash to let him know that his french fries were finished being radiated, but he seemed too agitated and distraught to hear me. Well, onward to more library searching. Ooh, I felt useful for a minute there. Helped a couple of guys in a mad search for books on Signor Dante Alighieri and his Beatrice. (2 Comments |Comment on this)