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x_losFriday, en route to Amy's to cut her hair, Molly, Jake and I spotted a cute, well-shaped green and blue sofa on the curb labeled 'Free!' We popped it into Molly's car and then remembered to actually /ask/ Amy if she wanted this couch we'd decided was perfect for her apartment: luckily, indeed she did. Molly repaired the butchery Cost Cutters had wrought on Amy's head with some hipster bangs. Their force is legend: when she swings her hair you swear you can hear Of Montreal songs drifting ever so faintly on the breeze. Were you gaze too long at these bangs, you would turn not into stone, but into a twee shoulder-strap messenger bag carried by someone named 'Sven.' Don't do it guys, Sven has like, nine bags now, he doesn't even need those.
Then we went to Heather's and tried an alcohol so tasty and amazing that I no longer remember its name. But it was a beautiful name. And Heather is a beautiful woman. And those were some truly, truly gorgeous salt and vinegar chips I left in her apartment, unguarded, among drunk boys, so that was probably the end of our love affair, there. I'll miss you, chips. We'll always have the Super Walmart.
Saturday I cleaned The Closet Of Infinite Horror for freaking hours. It's beautiful, though, I may like, post some pictures and make you all suffer through photos of a clean closet, because this is what miracles look like. I've still got to do a LOT of laundry and then go through those clothes, but largely it's done, and the Goodwill is about to be enriched by many bags, shoes and weirdly large t-shirts.
Then Amy picked my up and we went to Community Theater!Taming of the Shrew: it was pretty alright. Cut the baggy frame narrative. They went with a more 'partners in the joke' than 'subservient wife' interp, which is richer and more fun, but they could have pushed the physical chemistry more than they did to make that sing out? The delivery of the problematic end speech could have been more sly. It's been said before that Kate and Petruchio are ur-types for Beatrice and Benedick, and this is far from my favorite Shakespeare play. If you had really lively, good actors and great staging you could give them as a couple an awesomeness all their own, but on the page it's so--amorphous, I guess.
God I hate that dull, smarmy Harold Bloom essay on Taming, though. His praise almost made me dislike Kushner's adaptation of Dybbuk, which I adore. He loves what I love all wrong, dammit, and that's so much more insulting than just hating it.
Then we cleaned Amy's fridge and watched Kiss Me Kate, which I'd never seen before and really really loved. Except for the unfortunate info-dumping first scene where someone pretending to be Cole Porter pretends to be interested in a woman. And a bit of "From This Moment On" where someone lost a bet to Fosse and the contorted choreography got Too Crazy. The central couple's lovely--although Katy points out the songs in the original are a bit too long for their own good.
Today poor Katy felt wretched, and so we lolled about, watching some Simpsons and the first half of He Knew He Was Right. Trollope, like Elliot and Thackeray, is one of those period novelists I really should have read and never have. There was some discussion of trying him, though, because this adaptation's is great, and I generally love that era. The miniseries appears to have every notable British actor ever. I know Tolstoy liked Trollope (he's mentioned in Anna Karenina), and I love Tolstoy, so there could be some happy overlap here. If anyone's read Trollope and has a recommendation for where to start, I'd love to take it: with 47 novels his canon seems impregnable.***
Then Amy, Molly and I had very good spicy veggie bean soup, and Amy and I got to work. Today I looked over my candidates requirements again, and I emailed people asking for letters of recommendation (or asked the appropriate people for contact information if I couldn't get as far as that). Tomorrow I'm going to have to compile a little list of specs to give the wonderful people who've said they would help me out on this one, so their letters answer the specific needs of the places I'm applying to.
Actually I've now planned out an application work schedule for the week, and, provided I stick to it, the /bulk/ of the work should be accomplished come next Monday. The sooner the better: applications send me into furious panic attacks, so much so that I entirely bungled my undergraduate ones. Sitting down to work on That Horrible Binder (divided neatly into schools, with useful information information about costs, programs and requirements) very seriously makes me want to grab my car keys and run screaming, abandoning my precious Macbook just to get as far away from the hateful parade of dates and forms that occupies its tabs as I possibly can.
It's a stupid thing to get verklempt about, granted. Maybe it's the terror of crushing rejection? The soul-sucking bureaucracy involved? The wretched knowledge that I'm committing to something I can't easily amend or abandon when it suits me--I'm really scared of that /finality/, of the idea of fixedness, restriction and ending.
I know I'll be happier at grad school than I am now. I know I'll love and be good at the job at the end of the PhD tunnel. I know that I'll even get to be with my girlfriend once I'm accepted and move. But this post-college transitional existential malaise is as nasty as it is cliche, and I'm having trouble snapping out of it. The chronic illness really didn't help. I may not really be quite right until I'm out of the house, independently established, and have a /direction/ again.
So all this week it's CV updates, personal statements, begging particular programs to want me, and general blank-filling-in. After that perhaps a bit of a break, then the Financing Hunt begins.
If you know anything about grad school application, particularly in England, I'd appreciate your insight or tips. I'm going for a taught masters program rather than research, and full time rather than part.**
*Since English-speakers do comedy!German, do German-speakers ever do comedy!English? In English we use it to make something sound comically foreboding/serious/efficient--what would be the semantic flavor of English appropriation?
**Because as an international student, I have to: working whilst matriculating in order to pay the billz is for native Englishmen, apparently. That's totally cool. I'll just go shake my money tree then, shall I? Oh, oh wait. I don't have that tree. Bummer.
***When Louis Trevelyan talks about the Colonel visiting his wife, he (perhaps unconsciously) uses such intensely sexual language. The Colonel's thrusting himself upon Emily. With the Colonel visiting Emily at her Uncle's, Louis speaks of Emily letting him in as if the house were her body. It's really well done, but I wonder if that's due to Andrew Davies's adaptation, or if Davies is preserving this increasingly sex-fixated vocabulary from the source text?
Then we went to Heather's and tried an alcohol so tasty and amazing that I no longer remember its name. But it was a beautiful name. And Heather is a beautiful woman. And those were some truly, truly gorgeous salt and vinegar chips I left in her apartment, unguarded, among drunk boys, so that was probably the end of our love affair, there. I'll miss you, chips. We'll always have the Super Walmart.
Saturday I cleaned The Closet Of Infinite Horror for freaking hours. It's beautiful, though, I may like, post some pictures and make you all suffer through photos of a clean closet, because this is what miracles look like. I've still got to do a LOT of laundry and then go through those clothes, but largely it's done, and the Goodwill is about to be enriched by many bags, shoes and weirdly large t-shirts.
Then Amy picked my up and we went to Community Theater!Taming of the Shrew: it was pretty alright. Cut the baggy frame narrative. They went with a more 'partners in the joke' than 'subservient wife' interp, which is richer and more fun, but they could have pushed the physical chemistry more than they did to make that sing out? The delivery of the problematic end speech could have been more sly. It's been said before that Kate and Petruchio are ur-types for Beatrice and Benedick, and this is far from my favorite Shakespeare play. If you had really lively, good actors and great staging you could give them as a couple an awesomeness all their own, but on the page it's so--amorphous, I guess.
God I hate that dull, smarmy Harold Bloom essay on Taming, though. His praise almost made me dislike Kushner's adaptation of Dybbuk, which I adore. He loves what I love all wrong, dammit, and that's so much more insulting than just hating it.
Then we cleaned Amy's fridge and watched Kiss Me Kate, which I'd never seen before and really really loved. Except for the unfortunate info-dumping first scene where someone pretending to be Cole Porter pretends to be interested in a woman. And a bit of "From This Moment On" where someone lost a bet to Fosse and the contorted choreography got Too Crazy. The central couple's lovely--although Katy points out the songs in the original are a bit too long for their own good.
Today poor Katy felt wretched, and so we lolled about, watching some Simpsons and the first half of He Knew He Was Right. Trollope, like Elliot and Thackeray, is one of those period novelists I really should have read and never have. There was some discussion of trying him, though, because this adaptation's is great, and I generally love that era. The miniseries appears to have every notable British actor ever. I know Tolstoy liked Trollope (he's mentioned in Anna Karenina), and I love Tolstoy, so there could be some happy overlap here. If anyone's read Trollope and has a recommendation for where to start, I'd love to take it: with 47 novels his canon seems impregnable.***
Then Amy, Molly and I had very good spicy veggie bean soup, and Amy and I got to work. Today I looked over my candidates requirements again, and I emailed people asking for letters of recommendation (or asked the appropriate people for contact information if I couldn't get as far as that). Tomorrow I'm going to have to compile a little list of specs to give the wonderful people who've said they would help me out on this one, so their letters answer the specific needs of the places I'm applying to.
Actually I've now planned out an application work schedule for the week, and, provided I stick to it, the /bulk/ of the work should be accomplished come next Monday. The sooner the better: applications send me into furious panic attacks, so much so that I entirely bungled my undergraduate ones. Sitting down to work on That Horrible Binder (divided neatly into schools, with useful information information about costs, programs and requirements) very seriously makes me want to grab my car keys and run screaming, abandoning my precious Macbook just to get as far away from the hateful parade of dates and forms that occupies its tabs as I possibly can.
It's a stupid thing to get verklempt about, granted. Maybe it's the terror of crushing rejection? The soul-sucking bureaucracy involved? The wretched knowledge that I'm committing to something I can't easily amend or abandon when it suits me--I'm really scared of that /finality/, of the idea of fixedness, restriction and ending.
I know I'll be happier at grad school than I am now. I know I'll love and be good at the job at the end of the PhD tunnel. I know that I'll even get to be with my girlfriend once I'm accepted and move. But this post-college transitional existential malaise is as nasty as it is cliche, and I'm having trouble snapping out of it. The chronic illness really didn't help. I may not really be quite right until I'm out of the house, independently established, and have a /direction/ again.
So all this week it's CV updates, personal statements, begging particular programs to want me, and general blank-filling-in. After that perhaps a bit of a break, then the Financing Hunt begins.
If you know anything about grad school application, particularly in England, I'd appreciate your insight or tips. I'm going for a taught masters program rather than research, and full time rather than part.**
*Since English-speakers do comedy!German, do German-speakers ever do comedy!English? In English we use it to make something sound comically foreboding/serious/efficient--what would be the semantic flavor of English appropriation?
**Because as an international student, I have to: working whilst matriculating in order to pay the billz is for native Englishmen, apparently. That's totally cool. I'll just go shake my money tree then, shall I? Oh, oh wait. I don't have that tree. Bummer.
***When Louis Trevelyan talks about the Colonel visiting his wife, he (perhaps unconsciously) uses such intensely sexual language. The Colonel's thrusting himself upon Emily. With the Colonel visiting Emily at her Uncle's, Louis speaks of Emily letting him in as if the house were her body. It's really well done, but I wonder if that's due to Andrew Davies's adaptation, or if Davies is preserving this increasingly sex-fixated vocabulary from the source text?
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-03 08:22 am (UTC)Trollope: I'm going to be boring and say Barchester Towers, with or without The Warden first. It has marvelous dialogue, and a great shady adventuress and her cheerfully amoral brother as NOT villains; a great odious and ambitious clergyman as the villain, and a marvously Machiavellian bishop's wife. And a shades of grey Dean, and a really nice Reverend, and some worthies, but the earlier attractions are why you should read it.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-05 03:14 am (UTC)Oh, I should have known /you'd/ read him. :p Yes, I did hear this or the more political series were the generally recognized Greatest Hits, but this sounds lovely and I think I'll try it first, thanks!
no subject
Date: 2009-08-03 09:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-05 03:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-03 09:25 am (UTC)I've noticed that more and more teenagers use a surprising amount of English in their conversation (MTV and gaming seem to be their main sources). Some youth slang sounds almost like pidgin, though I'm not sure how much of it they actually understand in the sense that it's actual borrowing, and how much they just imitate. it's sort of on the fence between comedy/silliness and trying to be cool.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-05 03:28 am (UTC)Yeah, I'm really impressed by the comparative cheapness and the brevity of the programs--a year for a Masters and 3 for a PhD? How doable! Are you still thinking of going to England circa Winter after this for your exchange?
This sort of linguistic intersection is so interesting, though--both the idea of what quoting a given foreign language means or connotes to speakers of another given language, and that process of appropriation? Jokes about Engrish aside, I think the Wasei-eigo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasei-eigo) /Gairaigo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gairaigo) thing is really interesting.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-05 03:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-03 02:50 pm (UTC)I've never seen a staged version of Kiss Me, Kate *loses all theater cred, yo* but I understand that like most Hollywood musicals of that era, the movie butchers it a bit. But hey, Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore doing "Brush Up Your Shakespeare"? Worth living with a little butchering.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-05 03:30 am (UTC)I liked it a lot, but after glancing at wiki I've heard that too? Still, it's hard to feel the omissions when you've never seen the source material...
no subject
Date: 2009-08-04 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-04 05:54 pm (UTC)Prepare yourself for awesome sound effects!
no subject
Date: 2009-08-05 03:36 am (UTC)YOU KNOW. FOR WHEN WE MAKES THE BABIEZ.
Date: 2009-08-05 03:31 am (UTC)