our aspirations are wrapped up in books

wake up little eyes

2005-04-11T14:19:00.000-07:00

I know I totally just promoted something I was doing in the post before this one, but I'm doing it again. My friend Matt and I are starting a small business selling buttons and t-shirts. Our website is buttonpushers.net. If you know anybody in a band who might be interested, or not in a band, and just interested, we're going to start taking orders after exams.

Speaking of exams I hope everyone's having an okay go of studying. Here's a spacepop pick-me-up:

yo la tengo - "little eyes"

2005-03-24T15:01:00.000-08:00

i love life

2005-03-20T17:57:00.000-08:00

My god the weather was beautiful today. I've been leaving the windows open during the day for the last few days and I've been feelinga lot less stressed out, I hope the weather has been having a similar effect on some of you guys.

I read the Hnadmaid's Tale a little while back after I got my copy of it. There is a story attatched to that. My best friend worked at a certain bookstore here uptown for a couple years. Every Sunday night was a tournement of magic cards. The store would lock up early and a group of boys would come and play magic cards until eleven or so in the evening. Some nights I would go down there and hang out with Lisa while it was going on, because it was pretty boring, and we would just sit at the counter and listen to music and talk. We eventually started talking about the upstairs section of the store, or the attic. The space is directly above the main floor of the store and it is not lighted. It is basically a big, messy storage space. The floor is about seven books deep anywhere you can stand, and surrounding you there are massive mountains of books that reach the ceiling in places -- books that have been sitting there in the dark for ages. The owner has hired groups of boys to go up there and try to put things into garbage bags to clear out the space, but the size of the job is pretty staggering, and no one has had much luck. And, I guess, no one really cares. Anyhow, one night with a pack of Guinness, some flashlights, an extension cord, a stereo, and a Sigur Ros cd, Lisa and I went up there after the boys had gone home and the store was locked up for the night. We stayed until about five in the morning digging through the massive piles of books. By the time we were finished we were filthy and tired and had found a few gems. We also found some things that were kind of disturbing, and a dead bird which made me scream, but overall it was really neat. It is among my favourite memories of that summer and I found my copy of The Handmaid's Tale in one of the heaps.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the play tomorrow. I think you guys sound really super, and Erica has done an awesome job with the props. I'm gonna try to find some appropriate music tonight to play before and after, something 1909 sounding.

2005-02-13T15:29:00.000-08:00

What is remarkable, extraordinary - and the process remains inscrutable and mysterious - is that this quiet, anxious, sedentary, serious, invalidical English lady, without animal spirits, without adventures, without extravagance, assumption, or bravado, should have made us believe that nothing in the world was alien to her; should have produced such rich, deep, masterly pictures of the multifold life of man. - Henry James

I'm through a fair chunk of this book, and I am enjoying it quite a bit more than I had anticipated. After reading the first chapter and Adam's "sermon" I turned the book sideways to get the full effect of how thick it seemed and felt vaguely sick to my stomach, but I must admit that I am enjoying this quite a bit. I am finding her descriptions fairly captivating, her characters engaging for the most part and I feel like this is going down a road which won't be a wholly moralizing or fairy-tale like bore which is what I was expecting with Silas Marner under my belt. I didn't know this was her first novel, which also gives me a bit more keen of an interest in seeing it through til the end. I found a bunch of sites containing information on George Eliot as the most well-loved English realist, a "champion of the every day", and also some interesting biographical information -- check out this article on George Eliot by Virginia Woolf if you have a minute. Despite how this was easily the novel that I was dreading the most, I think I have developed a thesis statement for tomorrow out of this that I would like to tackle.

please turn off your dance music, please go to bed now

2005-02-12T16:20:00.000-08:00

This is completely unrelated to George Eliot but I just found out that I am interviewing Julie Doiron on my radio show on Wednesday. It will probably be around 2pm, on CFMH, and I am nervous and thrilled. Also I'm gonna be giving away two free tickets to her show. You should listen if you like her music.

that's just the bullets bouncing off my helmet

2005-02-12T12:59:00.000-08:00

This week has been ridiculous. To add to the ridiculousness the bookstore was out of the book and none were on order -- I figured this would be fine, but each day I fit in hunting for a new location in town to buy it and had no luck. Today I made it down from the market to the library and found it, despite the god's efforts to foil me again by crashing the look-up databases. It's longer than I thought it was but I'm going to sink my teeth into it tonight and see how it goes. The only other George Eliot I have read is Silas Marner, which I thoroughly hated. Bummer.

I'll be wearing my ugly clothes until the end of this post.

2005-02-06T21:28:00.000-08:00

I am sure that I read this out of context, but I laughed out loud when Jane, on their way back from the city when Mr. Rochester has been frantic about buying her clothes, says "You need not look in that way, if you do, I'll wear nothing but my old Lowood frocks to the end of the chapter."

I have something like eighty pages left to go read -- I'm kind of annoyed because I went looking for an article about something and read a few sentences about Rochester going blind by mistake. Does that happen? If so, oh wretched existence! I've spoiled everything. If not, what the hell? I've bookmarked the page just in case. Something that didn't add up to me while I was reading it was her status in the home at Thornfield. When Rochester calls Jane into his study on the first occasion, he apologizes a few times for bossing her around like an employee. He says that he is not used to having someone on his level -- someone who is his equal -- around the house. Later on, his friends cynically evaluate Jane's station, stripping it of credibility within their group. Soon after this occurance Rochester tells Jane that he doesn't care what the world will think of him for marrying her, someone so far below him. I wasn't sure why Jane was given more respect than, say, Mrs. Fairfax, while she was also being established as a low ranking individual, while simultaneously being referred to as his equal. The article I was looking for was about governesses, I'm going to take a look again when I've finished the book.

2005-01-09T18:16:00.000-08:00

Alright here I go. This will be breif, and will not include much that hasn't been brought up by others thus far. Sorry. I've been reading the Dorothy Wordsworth journals slowly all week but this was my day to settle in. I tried to think of things I could do to make myself get into it. I even had peas for dinner.

The thing is, I was never quite unaware that I was in fact reading. Ultimately I thought these were a bit of a head-ach to get through -- but I was also pretty drawn in by her language. Erica made note of some of these descriptions as well, whose posts on the texts were really nice to read by the way. Dry as the vast majority of those topics were I thought that the descriptions were really quite gorgeous in places. "The moonlight lay upon the hills like snow" -- poetic even. Regarding Dr. Jones' question on whether these are "artistic" or "literary" texts, I was planning to uses such phrases to make a case that they were, just to argue the other side. Though I've decided against that, I will note that texts like these make me wish I could sit on the floor in a household in the 19th century and just listen to people talk. We had a discussion in one of Dr. Maier's classes once about how these people filled their days with talking, reading and writing and the vocabularies they developed as a result of this. Really, for being a text that none of us have yet argued as particularly artistic, the woman sure knew how to turn a phrase.

Looking forward to hearing some other responses to these texts in class tomorrow. Bye.

2005-01-03T13:10:00.000-08:00

books huh.