The Garret

Except we're not halfway there; we're... kinda done. With grad school. For reals. I just turned in my last paper and I have nothing to do except look for a job and sparkly shoes to wear at Commencement.

I feel remarkably calm about it. Probably I am in shock, and should go find more chai. Yes. Chai is always the answer.

I have survived April! I am pretty damn pleased about this, let me tell you.

So, it seems like I never talk about books around here any more. This is probably because I spend all my time talking about books. But I was really fascinated by Christina Meldrum’s Madapple, which we read for class this week. I am convinced that the protagonist, Aslaug, is not a Dionysus figure but Antigone. a4yroldfaerie will agree with me once she’s actually read it. I highly recommend it as a dense, difficult YA book, btw. If you don’t mind a lot of crazy alongside your mysticism and botany. It also has a terrifyingly awesome cover, as well as fun things like Chosen Ones and maybe-incest and atemporal narrative! How can you resist?

Last class of the semester is over. There was pie and brie and Orange Crush afterward. Still have paperage to do. Wooooo.

Made Mexican wedding cookies (sans nuts) for M to take to class tomorrow. Mmmmbutter. Did the dishes in boiled water and ingenuity.

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In other news, I am convinced that the following Emily Dickinson poem is fair game for a post-Buffy interpretive community:

Fate slew him, but he did not drop;
She felled—he did not fall—
Impaled him on her fiercest stakes—
He neutralized them all.

She stung him, sapped his firm advance
But, when her worst was done,
And he, unmoved, regarded her,
Acknowledged him a man.

In a post-Buffy world, that second part’s even potentially funny.

You know, pretty often Edna St. Vincent Millay makes me feel like I've been punched in the stomach.

( This door you might not open, and you did )

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From the YA Realism Chronicles, or, Kdramas Are Totally Educational...

ME: Wow, this book seems really different than it did last time I read it! Talk about experience shaping reading!
K: I know! Word!
ME: But I’m seriously confused. Why is the kid calling his big sister unni and not noona?
K: ...Noonawhahuh? A year later and you're worried about vocabulary? Hon, sometimes you're kinda weird.
ME: I don’t get ittttttt.
K: ...
K: You know, sometimes after talking to you I feel like I need to Google something.

♥ Sometimes I love people.

Also, I really want a Skip Beat! icon. Or two.

So... that was emotionally draining.

I decided to watch the movie Bright Star instead of doing actual poetry work. It's about John Keats and Fanny Brawne! That's practically like doing poetry, right? Right?

Um. Well, now I'll be useless for the rest of the evening.

To outrageously stretch the spoon analogy, it's like opening up the silverware drawer thinking "oh, yes indeed movie, you will help me polish the spoons" and three hours later you look down and the movie has made off with not only the spoons but also the cutlery. And the silver polish. And you don't even care, because that would require spoons and the damn movie stole them all.

Another Saturday night, another poetry weekend gone by. I spent most of eight hours today doodling foxfish and walrus eagles and gilled werethingies. Had I been in other company, I would have spent at least some of that time arguing that at least half the songs in Oliver! are about prostitution. (What? They totally are!)

But at least K and I improvised a Buffy A-Z poem on the way back from lunch. It had rhymes and everything!

Also, it is freezing. Whyyyyy. Here, have another seasonal-appropriate poem.

( He met the star his enemy. They fought the woods leafless )

If you have any favorite poems (eta: or songs!) about supernatural stuff, I’d love to know about them. Any language welcome! I’m looking at anything, from Eurydice and Orpheus (please tell me Ovid wrote about them! he must have!) to “Goblin Market” to the Lorelai to the YA vampire poetry anthology that doesn’t yet exist but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

MY BRAIN: Okay! After much deliberation and chai I have a paper topic! I'm so relieved! Thank goodness that's done, I was really worried it just wouldn't happen this time.
MY BRAIN: Oh... wait, you want me to actually write the paper now? Sorry, no can do.

I had a great idea for a final anthology project that I actually want to work on, but I can't until I get these papers written. Somehow this gets more difficult every time.

Oh, is it spring? Here, have some poetry.

( April is the cruellest month )

Officially I'm on spring break. In reality, I'm desperately trying to get everything read, and to restart whatever poetry organ I may have. (I think it's the little purple one nestled right on top of my liver.)

And not to think about the future, because it makes me sick to my stomach.

Monday I went to class in costume. Was I Veronica Mars, you ask? Why, what gave it away? Was it the green blazer? The misanthropic attitude? The eyeliner?

Thursday I ran around trying to find a brand of whole wheat flour NOT made by King Arthur Flour, because that stuff simply refuses to rise. I failed, and thus my bread was unrisen. But reasonably tasty. The cornbread and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies turned out okay too. So... yay for epic baking?

In The Minionship news, I have decided to memorize more poetry. This will give some value to the hours spent at the copier or distributing things, value aside from the perfecting of movement and repetition. Do you have a favorite poem or poems in any language that I should know and memorize?

Poetry is said to keep you sane.

We shall see.

I’m supposed to be writing a paper, so of course instead I’m doing laundry with the windows open and lying around reading and plotting non-school things to do over spring break and lusting after shoes.

So... here, have a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem I found in my class reading the other week.

The Windhover
To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wingRebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

( flail and dork )

Spring fever, I has it bad. I've been here a year and a half--the longest I've stayed in any place since college.

And you know what? It’s noiiiiiisy, and there are drunken college studentssss, and the fire alarm keeps going off for no reason, and yesterday the pilot light went out on the stove but of course we didn’t know that was why the entire apartment smelled like gas and called the 24-hour emergency line who told us to call the fire department who showed up and were nice about it but clearly thought we were morons, and then they called the gas company, who sent a dude over who was nice and said just call the gas company first next time, ‘k?

On plus side, my poetry class has started up. It was an eight-hour marathon wherein we ended up discussing a lot of musical movie clips. The Court Jester, I have to say, looks kind of awesomely like a cross between the Errol Flynn Robin Hood and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I’m going to make cadragongirl watch the whole thing with me.

Unfortunately, we also watched and re-watched bits of The Wizard of Oz, and I now have Ding! Dong! The witch is dead! Which old witch? The wicked witch! Ding, dong, the wicked witch is deaddddd! stuck in my head morally, ethically, spiritually, and ecumenically. THANKS A LOT.

Later in the day, I wrote a very bad poem about the epic doomed love between a whale and a glow-worm. I don’t even know.

We didn't get to it in class, but we were also supposed to watch Topsy Turvy, a movie about Gilbert and Sullivan creating The Mikado. Kevin McKidd is in it, and we had an imaginary conversation that went something like this:

ME: It's Lucius Vorenus! Hi, Lucius Vorenus!
KMK: Who? I am a Scottish actor, and my corset is fabulous.
ME: Yes... yes it is. But Lucius Vorenus will also be fabulous!
KMK: Will there be corsets?
ME: Well...no. But there'll be armor!
KMK: Close enough.

It suddenly occurred to me that The Mikado would be greatly enlivened (not that it needs it) by ninjas. Especially if the three little maids from school were the ninjas. From ninja school. Come on, wouldn’t that be AWESOME?


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This is why I should not be in charge of things.

Safely in CA and counting down the days to Japan. I expect to spend most of them wandering around the house, Donald Keene translations in hand, absentmindedly wrapping things and trying not to kill myself with the stairs.

( airplanes, Gilbert & Sullivan, and keeping the fire department entertained )

Pre-semester booklist just came in. Heigh-ho Prius, away! To the library!