My facebook status right now reads, “in the middle of things, and can’t quite see the path to the end yet.” It’s a feeling that I have a lot. Sometimes it’s reassuring. I try to tell myself that I’m in the middle of, say, a novel, and the (happy) ending is still coming. Right now it’s just overwhelming.
I’m in the middle of the job search. I have applied to nearly twenty different places (mostly schools, for jobs that don’t require teaching qualifications) but haven’t heard back from anywhere, except for a few acknowledgements that they have received my application. I have several websites that I check every couple of days to try to find more places to apply, but everything I’m finding either has an immediate start or is something I’m not qualified to do yet. I can’t do something with an immediate start, since I’m working on my dissertation this summer and working part-time for the International Office as well. I may have to scale back the job applications – or at least the emotional stress of them – until it gets closer to September and I actually can do something with an immediate start. By then, I may need something with an immediate start. I just hope that the things I’m seeing now are still around then.
I’m in the middle of my dissertation research. Objectively, I have plenty of time. The paper’s not due until September. But if I don’t start writing something, I will lose momentum and get distracted by other aspects of the paper and other things in my life. But I keep running across more things that might be relevant, and take a break to find them and think about reading them. This is a normal stage for me of the paper-researching and paper-writing process. I just need to buckle down and get through it.
I’m in the middle of house-hunting. My housemates and I applied two and a half weeks ago for this house that we had totally fallen in love with. The estate agent said they’d be in touch ‘soon.’ We haven’t heard anything yet. My housemates’ lease is up in a month, and we need something we can move into in about three weeks. Things are getting a touch frustrating.
I’m in the middle of planning and writing a presentation for the International Office on student travel in the UK. This is another thing that I just need to sit down and do. I keep getting distracted by the websites and looking up my own stuff. I don’t have the money or the time for a trip somewhere (other than the ones I have already factored in). It shouldn’t take me too long to write the presentation. I just need to do it.
Any one of these things would be manageable if it were on its own. It's all of them happening at the same time - and all being at approximately the same chaotic stage - that is affecting me right now.
30 June 2009
25 June 2009
'Twitterature' is coming...
I am of two minds about this (not that anyone’s asked me, or would).
On one hand, it’s kind of intriguing. It’s always a good idea to at least experiment with new forms of production and new types of media. It may be a colossal failure, it may end up being a very short-lived success, or it may end up creating a new format for literature. Japan already has text-message novels, so what’s really the difference between that and Twitter lit? (Twit-lit? I shudder.) Also, the idea of compressing ‘classics’ into a more ‘manageable’ size is not exactly a new one. SparkNotes, Cliff’s Notes, and my personal favourite from a humour/entertainment perspective, Book-a-Minute . Really, this idea doesn’t sound that different from book-a-minute, at least right now.
But it remains to be seen what they’ll do with (or to) the books that they adapt. Is it just going to be plot summaries, in twenty tweets? Is it going to be twenty selected 140-character passages? Because classics aren’t classics merely because of the story they tell. They’re classics because of the way that they tell it. A writer’s style – the way s/he uses words, constructs sentences, lays out the paragraphs on the page, and so on – is so much a part of what makes a book a ‘classic’. Are these students going to maintain the authors’ styles, or is it going to be story reductions only?
When ‘Twitterature’ is released, I expect there will be howls of outrage over people who will read ‘Twitterature’ instead of reading the ‘classics’ that they condense. And there will be plenty of them. Just like there are lots of students who read SparkNotes or Cliff’s Notes or Wikipedia pages about books instead of reading the books that they’re based on, not to mention the people who watch the movie and think that qualifies as knowing the book. People forget that the plot of a book is not the same as the book itself. Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones’s Diary have the exact same plot, but they’re not the same book. (Persuasion and The Edge of Reason are an even closer connection, plot- and pacing-wise. Still not the same book.)
If ‘Twitterature’ is a way to reduce books while still maintaining a sense of the author’s style, then more power to them. If it becomes a gateway for people to get some exposure to a ‘classic’ and then read the full thing, then again, more power to them. If it is just a quirky way to summarize books that were on a high school reading list, then it’s not nearly as innovative or ambitious as they want it to be.
I am of two minds about this (not that anyone’s asked me, or would).
On one hand, it’s kind of intriguing. It’s always a good idea to at least experiment with new forms of production and new types of media. It may be a colossal failure, it may end up being a very short-lived success, or it may end up creating a new format for literature. Japan already has text-message novels, so what’s really the difference between that and Twitter lit? (Twit-lit? I shudder.) Also, the idea of compressing ‘classics’ into a more ‘manageable’ size is not exactly a new one. SparkNotes, Cliff’s Notes, and my personal favourite from a humour/entertainment perspective, Book-a-Minute . Really, this idea doesn’t sound that different from book-a-minute, at least right now.
But it remains to be seen what they’ll do with (or to) the books that they adapt. Is it just going to be plot summaries, in twenty tweets? Is it going to be twenty selected 140-character passages? Because classics aren’t classics merely because of the story they tell. They’re classics because of the way that they tell it. A writer’s style – the way s/he uses words, constructs sentences, lays out the paragraphs on the page, and so on – is so much a part of what makes a book a ‘classic’. Are these students going to maintain the authors’ styles, or is it going to be story reductions only?
When ‘Twitterature’ is released, I expect there will be howls of outrage over people who will read ‘Twitterature’ instead of reading the ‘classics’ that they condense. And there will be plenty of them. Just like there are lots of students who read SparkNotes or Cliff’s Notes or Wikipedia pages about books instead of reading the books that they’re based on, not to mention the people who watch the movie and think that qualifies as knowing the book. People forget that the plot of a book is not the same as the book itself. Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones’s Diary have the exact same plot, but they’re not the same book. (Persuasion and The Edge of Reason are an even closer connection, plot- and pacing-wise. Still not the same book.)
If ‘Twitterature’ is a way to reduce books while still maintaining a sense of the author’s style, then more power to them. If it becomes a gateway for people to get some exposure to a ‘classic’ and then read the full thing, then again, more power to them. If it is just a quirky way to summarize books that were on a high school reading list, then it’s not nearly as innovative or ambitious as they want it to be.
17 June 2009
Interesting things from my RSS feeds the last few days
“At the same time, however, it's hard not to wonder why a government that is confident it won fair and square would authorize police to beat citizens with abandon, shut down opposition headquarters and various news and social networking outlets, and arrest over 100 reformist politicians.” [Huffington Post article about the current situation in Iran]
NPR Monkey See Blog: The Shelf of Constant Reproach
For a long time, I didn’t have a shelf of constant reproach. Almost every book on my bookshelves was a book that I’d read, most of them several times. Now, of course, I have a bit of reproach staring at me. It’s not too bad yet; it’s only been in the last semester that I’ve gotten behind on my reading for pleasure, and I was even able to cull out the books that I knew I wasn’t going to get to and take them to the bookcrossing site on campus.
What I do have is a list of constant reproach. There are so many lists out there of ‘books you should read’ or ‘books that changed the world’ or ‘best books of xxxx’. And I’ve read a lot of them, but not all of them. And some of them I know I won’t read (anything by Joyce or Faulkner…really, anything experimentally modernist) but a lot of them I want to. And then there are all the books that have been published in the last, say, ten or fifteen years that I hear about and want to read. My list of ‘books I want to read’ is so freakishly long, and gets longer every day. I need a better filtering system for it.
APOD
I found this via Twitter. It’s gorgeous. And the archive goes back to 1995! I so do not have enough time these days to go back through it all but what I’ve seen so far is gorgeous.
Music and Emotion
Music and Neuroscience
Living Abroad
HAHAHAHA!!! I win.
Tips for 20-somethings
I still have problems with more than a few of these.
NPR Monkey See Blog: The Shelf of Constant Reproach
For a long time, I didn’t have a shelf of constant reproach. Almost every book on my bookshelves was a book that I’d read, most of them several times. Now, of course, I have a bit of reproach staring at me. It’s not too bad yet; it’s only been in the last semester that I’ve gotten behind on my reading for pleasure, and I was even able to cull out the books that I knew I wasn’t going to get to and take them to the bookcrossing site on campus.
What I do have is a list of constant reproach. There are so many lists out there of ‘books you should read’ or ‘books that changed the world’ or ‘best books of xxxx’. And I’ve read a lot of them, but not all of them. And some of them I know I won’t read (anything by Joyce or Faulkner…really, anything experimentally modernist) but a lot of them I want to. And then there are all the books that have been published in the last, say, ten or fifteen years that I hear about and want to read. My list of ‘books I want to read’ is so freakishly long, and gets longer every day. I need a better filtering system for it.
APOD
I found this via Twitter. It’s gorgeous. And the archive goes back to 1995! I so do not have enough time these days to go back through it all but what I’ve seen so far is gorgeous.
Music and Emotion
Music and Neuroscience
Living Abroad
HAHAHAHA!!! I win.
Tips for 20-somethings
I still have problems with more than a few of these.
15 June 2009
Crazy talk
At what point in a new relationship should romantic history be brought up? And how?
Of course you don’t want to start off a new relationship by comparing it to your previous ones. But past experience informs – sometimes to a large extent – present behavior. And knowledge of someone’s past experience can explain their present behavior – not necessarily excuse it, but make it more understandable. (“Oh, thaaat’s why she does that…. She needs to get over it.”) So telling a new boy/girl friend a bit about your past might be useful for explaining seemingly crazy behavior and getting through those first tenuous weeks/months.
For example, and this is a minor example in my personal arsenal of crazy, when my guy and I go dancing, I tend to watch him and be aware of where he is as much as I can. Part of it is that I really like watching him dance – he’s a good dancer and very fun to watch – but the other night I was watching him and thinking about it and realized that a part of the reason that I watch him so much is because of the time that I was abandoned at a dance by a date who left with someone else. [People who have ever talked to me about my love life may remember this story as “the date who brought a date to our date”.] Obviously that is not the full reason (he’s really fun to watch!) but it is a part of the reason.
And that’s not the only example. I have any number of paranoias – and I say paranoias deliberately because intellectually I know that they are irrational – about relationships. I know exactly where they come from – almost to the day in some cases. I can recognize their effect on my thought patterns and I am sure that they affect my actual behavior to an extent. Being trapped in them, I can’t objectively evaluate their impact on my behavior, but I’m sure it’s there. And I feel like it might help if people involved with me know about these paranoias and the triggers for them, so that they know that I’m not trying to act like a lunatic. I just don’t know what the best way to bring it up would be.
Of course you don’t want to start off a new relationship by comparing it to your previous ones. But past experience informs – sometimes to a large extent – present behavior. And knowledge of someone’s past experience can explain their present behavior – not necessarily excuse it, but make it more understandable. (“Oh, thaaat’s why she does that…. She needs to get over it.”) So telling a new boy/girl friend a bit about your past might be useful for explaining seemingly crazy behavior and getting through those first tenuous weeks/months.
For example, and this is a minor example in my personal arsenal of crazy, when my guy and I go dancing, I tend to watch him and be aware of where he is as much as I can. Part of it is that I really like watching him dance – he’s a good dancer and very fun to watch – but the other night I was watching him and thinking about it and realized that a part of the reason that I watch him so much is because of the time that I was abandoned at a dance by a date who left with someone else. [People who have ever talked to me about my love life may remember this story as “the date who brought a date to our date”.] Obviously that is not the full reason (he’s really fun to watch!) but it is a part of the reason.
And that’s not the only example. I have any number of paranoias – and I say paranoias deliberately because intellectually I know that they are irrational – about relationships. I know exactly where they come from – almost to the day in some cases. I can recognize their effect on my thought patterns and I am sure that they affect my actual behavior to an extent. Being trapped in them, I can’t objectively evaluate their impact on my behavior, but I’m sure it’s there. And I feel like it might help if people involved with me know about these paranoias and the triggers for them, so that they know that I’m not trying to act like a lunatic. I just don’t know what the best way to bring it up would be.
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