comparing apples and oranges.
I'm feeling a lot better after the rain and a shower. My living room, which yesterday reached 91 degrees, is now a "comfortable" 84. I even gave myself a little spritz with my Hesperides perfume.
Having mono has its plusses, one of which is that I have been reading more than I have in years. I began How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents at about 1 am last night, read until 5:30, then finished the book this afternoon. I liked it, except it's written backwards. I don't sympathize as easily with young children --especially upper class spoiled white Dominican children that live in guarded familial "compounds"-- so I cared increasingly less about the characters as the book progressed.
Before this I read the Handmaid's Tale, which took a little to get into but by the end really got me going. Two things I most liked: 1) the Marnie-esque (Geo's please catch that reference) use of the colour red, and the overall visceralbloodyfeminine visual Atwood creates and 2) the questions it raises about authorial intent and integrity, the influence of memory and the "see through a glass darkly" effect on the creation of narratives. And I love that the tale concludes with a anthropological (Canadian-at that!) commentary on these issues.
I think I am going to go to the library now and get Umberto Eco's In the Name of the Rose. Wait, is that what it's called? Oops... just googled it, it's just "The Name of the Rose." Eco is a writer whose existence I've been aware of and whose work I still haven't bothered to read.
He was most recently recommended to me by a friend who somewhat condescendly suggested, "Well, it's sort of a mystery, but don't expect it to be like the Da Vinci Code." This is the same person who grimaced at my Harry Potter excitement saying something like "I don't like fantasy, I prefer to read things that really make you think like The Brothers Karamazov--you know Dostoevsky?"
Now there's a useful comparison.
Anyways, I am hoping to get through an Eco book in my reading fervor. On a whim I also picked up some art criticism, which, like most of my textbooks that weren't more than half pictures, I simply didn't read in college. It's silliness for me to be reading McEvilly and his rejection of formalist Clement Greenberg because I don't really remember any art theory. That's not true: I remember being very excited about semiotics and art (I bet that's how I know Eco, actually), Clement Greenberg and his ecstatic raptures over...something, and a conversation about Lacan and how we can't see ourselves except in a mirror in my senior seminar, but I think that was one of the days I came to class stoned. (Senioritis. What's a college co-ed to do?)
Ok. This is a really long post. This is what happens when I'm alone for days on end.
Having mono has its plusses, one of which is that I have been reading more than I have in years. I began How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents at about 1 am last night, read until 5:30, then finished the book this afternoon. I liked it, except it's written backwards. I don't sympathize as easily with young children --especially upper class spoiled white Dominican children that live in guarded familial "compounds"-- so I cared increasingly less about the characters as the book progressed.
Before this I read the Handmaid's Tale, which took a little to get into but by the end really got me going. Two things I most liked: 1) the Marnie-esque (Geo's please catch that reference) use of the colour red, and the overall visceralbloodyfeminine visual Atwood creates and 2) the questions it raises about authorial intent and integrity, the influence of memory and the "see through a glass darkly" effect on the creation of narratives. And I love that the tale concludes with a anthropological (Canadian-at that!) commentary on these issues.
I think I am going to go to the library now and get Umberto Eco's In the Name of the Rose. Wait, is that what it's called? Oops... just googled it, it's just "The Name of the Rose." Eco is a writer whose existence I've been aware of and whose work I still haven't bothered to read.
He was most recently recommended to me by a friend who somewhat condescendly suggested, "Well, it's sort of a mystery, but don't expect it to be like the Da Vinci Code." This is the same person who grimaced at my Harry Potter excitement saying something like "I don't like fantasy, I prefer to read things that really make you think like The Brothers Karamazov--you know Dostoevsky?"
Now there's a useful comparison.
Anyways, I am hoping to get through an Eco book in my reading fervor. On a whim I also picked up some art criticism, which, like most of my textbooks that weren't more than half pictures, I simply didn't read in college. It's silliness for me to be reading McEvilly and his rejection of formalist Clement Greenberg because I don't really remember any art theory. That's not true: I remember being very excited about semiotics and art (I bet that's how I know Eco, actually), Clement Greenberg and his ecstatic raptures over...something, and a conversation about Lacan and how we can't see ourselves except in a mirror in my senior seminar, but I think that was one of the days I came to class stoned. (Senioritis. What's a college co-ed to do?)
Ok. This is a really long post. This is what happens when I'm alone for days on end.
