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July 3rd, 2008
10:31 pm
It's surprisingly difficult to find an academic source which argues that New York is the archetypal modern city. But I now have The American Monomyth, which'll help do my thinking for me, heh.
Dad won an iPod at a company event. It's a nice change from cutlery-based no-prizes. Or hard liquor; those bottles were shelved away to gather dust and faded labels. Dad doesn't listen to music though (or know enough about the Internet to download tracks), so he's giving it to me when I get back.
Only... I don't see the need for portable music. I carry a book around all the time, yeah; but an iPod's different. You have to put it in your pocket, for starters. I'm loathe to putting more stuff in my pockets than necessary. One wallet, and that's enough, thank you very much.
.,.I want to watch Bokurano!
EDIT: They're moving the storyline of Forgotten Realms 100 years into the future. Oh no! Where does that leave Alias? ...there'll definitely be more Drizzt, where he'll angst about how all his friends are dead and how it is important to kill orcs ...In hard-to-read italics too.
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July 2nd, 2008
08:35 pm
I decided to re-install Diablo 2 after Blizzard's announcement over the weekend. Planned on using the necromancer. The dude gets to raise skeletons from the dead and make corpses explode. Rotting meat and the smell of decay everywhere!
...but after searching my room, I remembered that I''d threw my Diablo 2 CDs away a long time ago.
Thank ceilingcat for my skeleton army-less days. The game's a huuuuge timesink, and I seriously cannae afford that now!
EDIT: Appropos of nothing, the various horrible Date/ Scary/ Epic Movies each see about 400% returns on studio investment. When you add it all up, that means audiences have shelled out over US $300 million to see poop jokes and other terrible things.
EDIT 2: Ye cats, the wikipedia articles devote half their space to explaining the various mass culture references.
mood: ![[mood icon]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/niaha/kitty/ankhappyp.gif) relieved
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June 30th, 2008
09:54 pm
from ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) hirondelle.
it is important to find those who have only read six (or less) books and beat non yoghurt-related culture into them.
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According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on their list.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them. 1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - I know the now-epigrammatic first sentence.
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - I loved them when I was 13.
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - I did this for high school lit, and it remains the only book I ever fell asleep reading.
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - It is a pop cultural text which has become mass cultural so I have no need to read it! The zeitgiest does the reading for me!
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - I like how she's hiding in a wardrobe at the start, and walking into the sky at the end.
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - Abridged?
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - The ending is very well-written, and an A.I sort of unsettling.
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - Ogg not like cerebral humor like this! RRAAR!
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - JABBERWOCKY!!!
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - PROPAGANDA!!!
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - SEE 33!!!
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - Dr. Iannis's speech on love! The nonsensical choices that a life can be built on!
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell - Communism is bad because the pigs will turn the horse into glue!
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - Why's Left Behind not on this list? They're of equal popularity, equally religion-tinged, and equally devoid of literary merit.
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - The ending, the ending!
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood - An argument so extreme that it could only appeal to teenage femynists.
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel - Too much magic, not enough realism.
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - I loved it when he was taking the subway!
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Rather different from 100 Years.
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker - I'd have done badly for Gothic Lit (the other main text was godforsaken Jane Eyre) if not for this.
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce - I will read this someday! When I have a lot of time!
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro A good thematic accompaniment to The Time Travellers Wife.
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White - I could never anthropomorphize the spider enough to feel sad when it died.
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - this will give you diabetes.
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton - I still wish they had gone to the Land of Ice and Fire!
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - I always confuse it with Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince!
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare - I have seen The Lion King. I think that counts.
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - An Eden of unlimited food!
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - I like the musical a lot! There is nothing on Earth that we share! It is either Valjean or Javert!
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So far, I have written an introduction and one solitary straggler of a paragraph.
mood: ![[mood icon]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/niaha/kitty/ankhyperp.gif) energetic
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June 25th, 2008
01:40 am
My Fables essay in 1 minute:
More pertinent to my future, there's this report. Hopefully the place'll be in the West/ Central, and ready within the next three to four years. Then, well, at least I'll have a Plan C. (But I'm still leaving Singapore the first chance I get.)
EDIT: 4 a.m is not a good time to be thinking about how I can spend as little words as possible describing Campbell's hero journey because the theory simply doesn't hold that much water. Funny, that, since Campbell's my favourite theorist. 'S like a first love: simply sweet but in retrospect it would have ended in diabetes of the heart. ...I am Cynical Bastard (TM)! Yay!
mood: energetic
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June 23rd, 2008
04:38 pm
I'm doing the little life-upkeep things that I kept putting off. Like, I bought Batman Begins for $14. I don't normally buy DVDs, but Disc 2 extras are very hard to find on the web. Spider-Man, though, they're selling the deluxe version for $57. I'll have to make a trip down to JB Hi-Fi sometime this week. Maybe they've a cheaper alternative.
Cut hair (still keeping the emo fringe) and ordered books from the school library. Tales From the Crypt, please come soon!
I lay awake in bed until 4 am last night. It was a cold night; I couldn't get warm (especially my feet), so had to use double blankets in the end. My body still aches like fuck. Seriously, with healthcare costs being what they are, I literally cannot afford to get sick. But if I do, I hope it's from a fever! At least that doesn't require moneys to treat.
Picked up 2 essays from earlier in the semester.
Starting work on thesis chapter 1 after dinner.
My neck, owww, my neck.
EDIT: Ohh! So that's why there were jokes about taxpayer's money at the research conference the other week!
mood: ![[mood icon]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/niaha/kitty/anksadp.gif) in pain
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June 20th, 2008
11:35 pm - showtime
Did a posthumous read-through of a coursemate's draft this evening. I'm almost as critical of other people's work as I am of my own, so I basically bled digital red all over it. But it was a good paper, really! Answered the question well and had a cogent conclusion. I hope my good vibes got through! And I've spent the last week boganing off with rum and comics, getting lost in the Queen Street area (no, rum wasn't involved), and good food. In fact, I'm typing this whole thing with one hand (my non-dominant right), since the other's tearing apart half a BBQ chicken. Did you know that reading about food while eating makes what you have in your mouth even more tasty? I wish I had went to this conference! They wax on in no unCerteaun terms about kou lou yok and possibly roti prata! I miss kou lou yok and roti prata! Still....five days setting should be enough for any one person. I borrowed books out from the library today after the focus group meeting. I'll read through them over the weekend, and start writing the first chapter of my thesis Monday. Will have to pick up Spider-Man + Batman Begins from HMV or JB Hi-Fi too. There's most probably extra-textual stuff on the DVDs that I'll need. Heeey, they might also have Big O Season 2 around if I'm lucky. I don't watch many animuus anymore (the latest was FullMetal Alchemist back in Year One), but Big O is too damn stylish for words. And it has R. Dorothy Wayneright. Who is expressionlessly bitchy and effortlessly intellectual! R. Dorothy Wayneright is teh sexey!
EDIT: OMG Big O on Mom and Dad's TV would be so cool!
EDIT 2: So it's past 2 am, and I've just spent the last one hour in bed failing so sleep and thinking about my thesis. Among other, more practical concerns, it'd great to look back and remember that I finished it three weeks into term.
mood: hyper
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June 17th, 2008
04:47 am - the wife's story
Ah. It took a whole night, but I finally found:
mood: pleased
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June 15th, 2008
06:01 pm - holding out for a neko
ceilingcat sent pedalfastercat to save us from our sins but we have failed pedalfastercat
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June 13th, 2008
07:03 am
Fin. Ished.
Plan for today = scan that shot of Snow White into my essay body. Pass up essay. Meet with group for socializing/ bitching session, then buy strawberry/ blueberry schnapps from the bottle shop to drink myself into an alcohol-induced sleep.
It is a good plan, and I shall now take a week's break before I begin on why Spider-Man is the 1001st face of the hero. (It is a tres lame chapter, I know.)
Would normally count words but too tired. Have run out of energy.
It's wonderful outside my room now. There's so much mist outside that the world looks like it's behind a white veil.
EDIT: Ah, what the heck. ...4413 words. Heh; that's more that I thought I'd manage.
mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/niaha/kitty/anksleepyp.gif) exhausted
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June 12th, 2008
01:59 pm
Final editing for the Fables essay starts now!
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ceiling cat sent down happycat to save us from our sins. But happycat has run out of happy.
mood: ![[mood icon]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/niaha/kitty/ankawakep.gif) awake
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01:19 am
acyl's points on the utter skullfucking idiocy that is high school lit. teaching in Singapore bear repeating:
The specific book doesn't matter. What you should be learning about is...how an author does what they do
The sacredness of canon ...that's all well and good for religiousy stuff. But for Lit ...give me Keats beating up fairies or Blake doing Tyger-style kung-fu any day. To make literature sacred is to divorce it from the pleasures of self-interpretation
mood: ![[mood icon]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/niaha/kitty/ankgeekp.gif) working
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June 11th, 2008
04:04 pm
zerotonin: I seriously never got how you all manage with uni and work at the same time.
JE: By suffering.
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mood: drained
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June 6th, 2008
03:02 pm
Gave a coursemate a book he wanted/ needed for the major essay. Attempted to write some more, but realized I can't think.
I'll treat myself to a pizza, and then it'll be back to the library to write about carnival.
On the plus side, I did come up with this (scroll down) Song of Ice and Fire-related theory!
mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/niaha/kitty/ankawakep.gif) stressed
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June 5th, 2008
08:22 pm - my fringe is long enough
Watching the anime intros to the mid-90s X-Men cartoon:
Jubilee has nicer shades, Wolverine kills the cameraman, Magneto controls demons, and Beast has MAGNETIC SHOKWAAVE!
And here, Jean Grey does the mysterious anime girl thing. With hair flowing across the screen, even. Also: moon prominently in background. And everyone is very angry/ determined/ constipated and makes sure that the camera has extreme close-ups of their facial expression!
Compared to the original series, the animation is cooler, but the music sucks.
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2414 words in re: carnival, Fables, and the everyday life.
mood: ![[mood icon]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/niaha/kitty/ankangryp.gif) unsatisfied
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June 3rd, 2008
01:48 pm
This is the best thread ever!
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503 words down. Today: Summarize Felski + buy pasta and sauce
mood: stressed
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June 2nd, 2008
04:22 pm
Random notes from the research snapshots gathering:
- I wonder how much star death'd affect new Transformers movies, which are being marketed with a very heavy dash of nostalgia. Peter Cullen, please don't die!
- Psychoanalysis is *seriously* not popular these days. 'Cept for that one guy in the Lit. department, who is legendarily good in defending it. I had the priviledge to hear him do so once. My jaw dropped.
- There is probably something to be said for how SKY News is like reality TV.
- Have been recommended, for the second time, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
- Lollies and disgust. There's an upcoming paper talking about the unprintable things that children do with lollies.
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Am spazzing out. I have a research question, but I'm just not familiar enough yet with theories of everyday life. Ah well. I'll start with introducing Fables first, and the diadectic nature of the (post-) Victorian fairy-tale. Then to read the ideas of everyday life proper.
I JUST WANTED TO TELL PEOPLE ABOUT SUPERHERO MOVIES! THAT WAS ALL.
...heeey, this is kinda like my original proposal re: fairytales.
And it's scary now, looking at that blank notepad window, but hey: In every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.
It has been raining for the past few days. Add in Dickensian factory gates and this must be what London is like. THIS! IS LONDON! TONIGHT WE SLOSH ABOUT IN HELL!
mood: stressed
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June 1st, 2008
01:24 am - the soul still burns
Transcending history and the world
a tale of paws and claws eternally retold
mood: geeky
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May 30th, 2008
03:37 pm
Presentation done. Made everyone in the room wear SARS masks so I could interpellate them as risk-hyperconscious subjects.
No more lessons for the rest of the year. Wow. I'll miss them. Felt as though I was getting soundly beaten with the learning stick most of the time, but they were enjoyable nonetheless; all those new ways to look at the world.
Now there's the major essay where I talk about how Fables (with its nods to the carnival and magical realism problematizes) everyday life. I know next to nothing about either critical lens, but I don't want to have brought my set 8000 km across an ocean for nothing. Woo!
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Sadly, this is not a toy:
Coolness of the pose aside, I like how they get across that it's an (evil) animated suit of armour. Look at the feet, and the evil energy (?) where there should be flesh or chain!
Oh Nightmare; you have my loyalty forever, and I will sacrifice furries to you every third full moon!
mood: impressed
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May 20th, 2008
08:40 pm - rivets
Girl Here Sprouts Wings at 16 - Richmond News Leader, September 29, 1954
I found this picture while searching for evidence to jam into my paper. (Its first horrible draft is now complete but for me finding something positive to say regarding Richard Reynolds's horrible work.)
I find its use of colour pretty jarring; every single photograph I've ever seen from that time period (1954, hey!) has been sepia-toned. Or faded, or black and white. This ...isn't. And that the girl's is either dead or a grandmother now ...and she's so young here.
...and that's all I can think to say right now. Brain hurts, and I'm seriously not proud with the quality of work that I've (nearly) finished.
mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/niaha/kitty/anktiredp.gif) tired
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May 19th, 2008
08:27 pm
I now have approximately 2,300 words. Unfortunately, most of it is shit.
Heh, at least the farewell party just now went well. Was thinking that the food everyone contributed was really different from what I'd get back home. It was mainly baked goods - I scored a gigantic chocolate chip muffin and homebaked ginger cookies - and chips with dips-that-aren't-just-salsa. Like the Greek eggplant one, and the sun-dried tomato one. Yum!
And the rice! MAI GOD! Very good spiced rice with sesame oil, chilli, peas, corn, and tofu! Everyone went for it! Amusing for me because back home there'd be a surplus of rice/ noodles, and everyone'd be going for the scanty baked goods.
(The muffin cardboard box, I was expecting it to contain savoury Indian curry puffs because that's what I associate that sort of cardboard box with at parties)
Was talking with another person who's also from an AC school. The Singapore system, all that streaming and GEP-ness and A Levels ...it really means zilch in the long run. Funny how it all seemed so important back then, though.
Also, alcohol. We were sitting in a large circle and sharing our research (non-)progress with the rest of the cohort. Which broke my discussion of Song of Ice and Fire with this dude. (Everyone loves Tyrion and Arya and understands what the Hound is there for, and Ned was seriously a top bloke. Poor guy. Anyway.)
Anyway. I got to wave my champagne flute about in the air while telling the class about non-linear time, and how everyone will just laugh at you if you go with structuralist narratology today, and did the "nah-nah-nah-nah-nah Batman!" theme, and followed that up with "Holy empty glass, Batman!". Not sure if everyone got what i was saying - to be honest, I really didn't get what most of the Art History people were telling me - but everyone laughed ...so that's good right?
Then there were talks about funding. The UK is bad like a very disobedient badger for it. After all, why let international students study for free when you can charge them three times the fees of local students? Canada, on the other hand, isn't. And there aren't many people there too...
I got a bit tipsy, but I did help to put the tables back in their proper places!
Also: Alcoholic gatherings in classrooms are expressedly forbidden under university regulations. So nobody applies for permission. But everyone does it, so everyone else overlooks whatever might be going on because it'll be their turn to hold one sooner rather than later, and you don't want to break the system, oh no.
mood: stressed
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