felis_ultharus

I develop weird obsessions -- usually they don't last more than a week or so, but for awhile someting, almost always something obscure, obsesses me and I feel driven to find out all I can. The stranger and more obscure, the better.

These obsessions have been everything from Norse funeral customs, to Medieval bestiaries, to Bible translation, to lost gay language Polari. It's not always historical or literary, however. Very weird pop culture mutations get me every time.

This week, thanks to montrealais, it's baby names. And more than anything else, it's the name Raistlin.

( The final revenge of Raistlin )

So I'm going to English Academic Hell.

(I picture as a vast auditorium where they're holding a neverending conference entitled "Postmodernist and poststructuralist responses to Marxist readings of George Eliot's Middlemarch".)

My sin? I'm reading Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and can't shake the mental image of Queen Gloriana as Princess Zelda from The Legend of Zelda video games, and the Red Cross Knight as Link.

In my defence, the characters from The Faerie Queen are supposed to be Elves. Very, very Protestant elves making war on Catholic dogma in a thinly-disguised allegory, but elves nonetheless.

ETA: On the subject of Elves, Protestant and otherwise, I'd just like to sure my players know we're having a game tomorrow. Shall it be my place, or somewhere else...? For the record, we have air-conditioning now.

Life

I thought I was on the mend, but I had to come home dizzy from work today. It was still too soon after the surgery. I hope I'm not coming down with a fever (my doctor was worried).

Politics

I flew off the handle yesterday when I discovered that hole in the government records. Turns out it's not something Harper's been plotting, but a procedural void. All four parties are responsible -- I don't think they even realize that their votes aren't being recorded in some circumstances.

I'm going to present an emergency motion to the NDP's convention in September. This procedural hole is fairly easy to fix, as soon as politicians notice the hole is there.

Even if Harper isn't responsible for the hole in the records, with his attacks on the press right now, we need accurate government records to keep track of what all the parties are doing. This is the worst time to have gaps in the records, and so far there's been a gap for every single vote this year on a government bill.

General Geekery

Everyone who's ever seen Neon Genesis Evangelion is actually required to go here. Yes, that's the law. I checked.

I'd issue a spoiler warning for everyone elese, but I think they'd all just be lost.

I love Evangelion. But it is really pretentious. I think I'd hate it as a book. Too James Joyce.

Maybe if Finnegan's Wake was done as an anime, it would be more enjoyable. If Joyce had giant cyborgs, badly-done quantum mechanics, and homoerotic subtext, I'd like him more.

I have spent the last few days deeply immersed in my writing, with time taken for reading and a few long walks.

My novel is going well -- better planned this time than ever, and so far better crafted. his version is a fair bit longer than my previous ones. I've already hit 130 pages, and I expect it to be a lot longer.

I'm getting through Susannah Moodie story of settling the ontario wilderness at a snail's pace. I can generally only take her book in small doses each day, but I am finally approaching the halfway point.

She did have an interesting chapter on racism, and on culture shock when the British and the American Loyalists were forced into the same small space. The story on the lynching of a black man in Southern Ontario for marrying a white woman was a pretty disturbing read.

For em_fish: did you know Peterborough was settled in a region at the far end of a swamp that people used to believe lead to the edge of the world?

I now have all my textbooks for the coming year. I looked through The Poetics of Postmodernism, and it seems to contain less Postmodernese than I would've expected. This is good.

Postmodernese, for those of you who don't know, is the evil eldritch language of the Lovecraftian old ones, taught and spread by evil university professors in preparation for Cthulu's and Nyarlathotep's return. Any attempt to understand it drives the user to madness -- or worse, to Mississauga.

A grab-bag of things:

1. Last night, the marvellous archdiva played host to a movie night and fireworks viewing, which was wonderful. In spite of being asocial to the point of hermitness lately, I had a good time. I met metawidget, who hath now been befriended :)
   
   
2. Even lame fireworks, reflected off the TVA building or the CBC tower, are neat. From the TVA building, the each of the bursts looked like a thousand falling stars. On the CBC tower, they became wildfires and fast-moving rivers. Funny how the reflections should be more interesting than the originals, but I guess that's the whole premise of art and writing, isn't it?
   
   
3. After managing to worm my way out of reading Susannah Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush in three consecutive literature courses, I'm biting the bullet and reading it. It has a major place in my next CanLit course, and there's just no escaping it.
   
   And it's tedious, but sometimes unintentionally funny. I mean, reading about a woman go on for ages about how heroic she is for surviving the Canadian wilderness while her husband and maid do all the work. And the poetry that ends each chapter is so awful, it reads like angsty 11-year-olds posting on LJ. The prose is more purple than a pack-a-day smoker after his tenth flight of stairs.
   
   Plus she really hates the Irish. She despises the Irish. She comes across as particularly shallow when she complains about how loud and uruly the Irish are -- the Irish who, fleeing the Potato Famine, are now dying of cholera on Grosse Ile. You can almost hear her saying "Can't they die a little more quietly?"