![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelseagirlLunch with the group yesterday -- much fun, as always. But if I were focused in gender studies mode, I might have found it significant that seven women could make as much noise as an entire fantasy baseball league's worth of men -- easily three times as many as us . . . I have to recognize that my life partner is a DVD addict -- most of Barb's and Felicia's birthday gifts (it was a double birthday lunch)were DVDs and we had all of them except one. Note my deflection of this away from myself -- the books are my fault, the DVDs his.
Early St. Patrick's day dinner at Jen's. Her friends are not boring -- one of the women was a painter who's showing at galleries enough to make her living at it, extremely cool to hear with all the people I've known still in day job mode. One of the guys was a makeup artist who recently worked with LaToya Jackson, and told of her, at a Geraldo rehearsal singing Patsy Cline's "Crazy" with her lipstick smearing all over her teeth. Finally saw pictures of Anton's fabulous antique Chinese "opium bed" -- which would be great in a studio as it creates its own little room, but if I could afford it I could also probably afford to live in an apartment with more than one room . . . M. was pleased to be given lots of beer and corned beef; living with a vegetarian is taking a bit of a toll on him. Gigi on sugar is scary.
Reviewing Fanon for teaching with *Heart of Darkness* I had great hopes for the Norton Critical Edition, but all the essays are either comparisons to *Apocalypse Now* or they're about racism in the book on a too-obvious level. I hope that if I can find the right passage of Fanon, and have them read it first, perhaps it might encourage them to draw those conclusions without hammering them over the head. I don't want them to simply go into the book thinking "This Book Is Racist" -- more interested in seeing whether/when the penny drops. *A Dying Colonialism* is really fascinating me on this reread, though unfortunately not finding the right things in it. Several books to go.
Finally read *The Corrections*, which has been sitting on the shelf since summer. Something about the first pages kept putting me off. Lots going on there. He mixes bleakness and satire in interesting ways -- the early passages on Chip suggested he was going to be fairly merciless to his characters (*A Frolic of His Own* comes to mind), but by the end I found myself with characters I'd originally dismissed as purely unpleasant. I'm not sure the balance always works, but it's interesting, and the book's really engaging. Of the hyped books I couldn't wait for the paperback on (*Atonement*, *Falling Angels*, *The Little Friend*), this one came closest to expectations -- though ironically, by the time I got around to reading it, the paperback had come out . . . The scene in the gourmet food shop was my favorite -- I can completely believe the $75 salmon filet, and it struck me just right that "all the women were slim and thirty-six; many were both slim and pregnant." The academic satire was broad, but I couln't help the smiles of recognition.
Must get offline and to work -- Rick and a friend are giving a jazz concert at St. Peter's later this afternoon.
Early St. Patrick's day dinner at Jen's. Her friends are not boring -- one of the women was a painter who's showing at galleries enough to make her living at it, extremely cool to hear with all the people I've known still in day job mode. One of the guys was a makeup artist who recently worked with LaToya Jackson, and told of her, at a Geraldo rehearsal singing Patsy Cline's "Crazy" with her lipstick smearing all over her teeth. Finally saw pictures of Anton's fabulous antique Chinese "opium bed" -- which would be great in a studio as it creates its own little room, but if I could afford it I could also probably afford to live in an apartment with more than one room . . . M. was pleased to be given lots of beer and corned beef; living with a vegetarian is taking a bit of a toll on him. Gigi on sugar is scary.
Reviewing Fanon for teaching with *Heart of Darkness* I had great hopes for the Norton Critical Edition, but all the essays are either comparisons to *Apocalypse Now* or they're about racism in the book on a too-obvious level. I hope that if I can find the right passage of Fanon, and have them read it first, perhaps it might encourage them to draw those conclusions without hammering them over the head. I don't want them to simply go into the book thinking "This Book Is Racist" -- more interested in seeing whether/when the penny drops. *A Dying Colonialism* is really fascinating me on this reread, though unfortunately not finding the right things in it. Several books to go.
Finally read *The Corrections*, which has been sitting on the shelf since summer. Something about the first pages kept putting me off. Lots going on there. He mixes bleakness and satire in interesting ways -- the early passages on Chip suggested he was going to be fairly merciless to his characters (*A Frolic of His Own* comes to mind), but by the end I found myself with characters I'd originally dismissed as purely unpleasant. I'm not sure the balance always works, but it's interesting, and the book's really engaging. Of the hyped books I couldn't wait for the paperback on (*Atonement*, *Falling Angels*, *The Little Friend*), this one came closest to expectations -- though ironically, by the time I got around to reading it, the paperback had come out . . . The scene in the gourmet food shop was my favorite -- I can completely believe the $75 salmon filet, and it struck me just right that "all the women were slim and thirty-six; many were both slim and pregnant." The academic satire was broad, but I couln't help the smiles of recognition.
Must get offline and to work -- Rick and a friend are giving a jazz concert at St. Peter's later this afternoon.
