I'm going to spoiler-tag/put this under a cut, but frankly, I don't see how anyone could possibly be spoiled. Because either you've read the books and already know, or you've been hiding under a rock hoping all the Twilight stuff will please, please go away and you're not going to see it anyway. But, LIKE I SAID, the thing has got werewolves in it, so it's all good, plus I was hoping it would kick-start some ideas for Infinitus. Which it did, sorta, but it was more along the lines of "dear Lord, I really HATE the 'werewolves mate for life' meme. Hate it, hate it, hate it a LOT."

You can read an actual review for a real film critic review. Also, I am leaving the m15m ing to cleolinda , who will no doubt have one up pretty soon, but I did mutter quite a bit under my breath anyway. I'm just giving you the Moonyprof spin with some Shakespeare and werewolves angles.

I intentionally went to a quiet early afternoon showing at a quiet arty theater. I know, I probably should have gone to a later one with more actual fans.
( Oh, go ahead, it won't kill you. )


This was a fairly snarky crowd. Roger Ebert has a thoroughly bitchy review which is maybe a little much, but I think he makes a lot of great points. Cleolinda, though, nails it when she points out that New Moon really feels like a huge, pointless digression. We already knew Bella wouldn't leave Edward for Jacob no matter what, so why were we sitting around for over two hours?

I just want someone to go through Twilight and New Moon and make me a Good Bits version, with vampire baseball, Martin Sheen EvilVamp, and anything in which a werewolf is running around, snarling, and chewing on tasty vampire chunks.

I'll probably come up with an Infinitus idea tomorrow. I'm also going to finish off those Twilight essays--two more of them, so stay tuned.

Grading.

Well, huh.

Anyone who has had to grade things and after awhile, you think you're losing your mind?

What does this mean: "The reason it is obvious that portraying the ghost of Caesar through projection was advanced for the time is the way in which it stood out as highly advanced in both the scene and for the movie as a whole." ?

This particular paper actually improved partway through. There was one where I didn't even know which assignment the student had chosen.

I can't just run through writing down bad grades. I'm probably giving them better grades than they actually quite deserve. Besides, if I don't tell my students what is wrong AND how they can fix it, I'm not doing my job. It's easy to drip red ink all over misspelled words, but it's hard to tell a student how to fix incoherence. For one thing, you have to figure out what they thought they meant, why they went off the rails, and how to get them there in a way that they'll understand. For another, the truly incoherent papers are probably mostly written by students who were really trying. It was, in many cases, the best they could do, which is really sad.

So there is lots of grading, and the cats have become fat and are on a diet. I'm trying to work hard and get my grading all done by Wednesday. On Wednesday, I'm going to a performance of Love's Labors Lost touring from the Globe in London, with an all-male cast. Then that evening I'm teaching some non-English drama for once: French tragedy and Kabuki theater. It's been fun preparing for that, and I thought maybe some of you might like to see some videos I'm working with.

This is a piece called "Heron Maiden." It's pretty much a solo dance--the English narration tells you what's going on. If you stick through it, you'll see some amazing onstage costume changes.
( cut for long video context )It starts slow, but it's worth it for the costume changes at the end.

Today I will finish grading and commenting, but I will also cook--a nice buttery yellow cake, I think, and plain roast chicken with winter veggies.

(Apologies for cross-posting on my other LJ.)

  --from today's lecture on Julius Caesar.

"Brutus:  My answer is, not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more."

Caesar < Rome

I admit, I was kind of proud of that.

Thank you, chibitoaster , for the manga version of Julius Caesar.  My students enjoyed it.

*****


GRAH, it has been totally crazy.  The furloughs are driving me bananas, because every item of paperwork turned in for a deadline has to take account of my furlough days, the campus-wide furlough days, and everybody else's furlough days.  So if something was due today, I have to have turned it in for a signature on Friday, and if there was a problem on Monday and someone has a question, that it is tough tuna; I must wait until midnight to answer it.  

The conference went really well, and then I got slammed with grading.  

I've been teaching a lot of Renaissance revenge tragedies recently.  I wish there was a good video version of The Revenger's Tragedy out there. How can you NOT love a play where a skull gets its own revenge, huh?   

Despite the general $$$ shortage that I'm sure everybody else has, too, I'm going to come up with something wolfy for Infinitus.  I'm trying to think of something good.

I went to a sing-along showing of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and won a small door prize.  Does anyone know anything about a graphic novel called 30 Days of Night: Bloodsucker Tales?  How excited should I be?

I dropped off the face of the earth because it was crunch time--I had to write a paper for a conference in Virginia at the Blackfriars Theatre. Aside from the fact that it's an awesome conference, it was also in honor of one of my mentors, Andrew Gurr, so I just had to go. I got to see some fun plays and hang around with other people who actually care about stage history, but I also got to say in public:

 Just got a letter from our Provost about our furloughs.  Pffft.  We're supposed to designate certain days we "won't be working," which is nonsense, of course.  I can't quite tell whether we *have to* take a certain number of teaching days off or what.  Teaching days off we're supposed to give students activities to do, which is something like what I do when I have to be off campus for a conference.  But a lot of that just feels like telling students, "sorry, I can't be arsed to teach you.  Here's some busywork."  Also, the real work for me is grading, and the only way to cut that back is to cut the number of assignments.

There are a lot of unanswered questions, too.  Let's say I'm going to a conference (which I am) and I take one of those days as an unpaid day off:  Is that a problem?  Because of course at a conference I'm there for business purposes and if I take a furlough day during one of them, that almost guarantees that I wouldn't get travel reimbursement for that day (assuming that we'll get any travel funding, which maybe we won't.)  Even if we don't get any travel funding, I don't see how I can say to the University that I am NOT working and then legitimately state to the IRS that I AM as a business expense.  And . . . and . . .

. . . .bugger it, I could teach about ten times better without any idiotic rules or a classroom, or evaluation forms, or technology.  All I need is my brain, my personal library, permission to tell my students what I really think of their writing or their ideas, several reams of paper, a long wooden table, and a lot of tea and buns (before 6 pm) or hard cider, cheese, bread and summer sausage (after 6 pm).

And frankly, rules or no rules, that's what I'm probably going to do.  I am probably going to tell my students that I will in NO WAY be at Starbuck's off campus at certain times and will be UTTERLY UNINTERESTED in talking about literature and drama if they're there.  Bugger the university, bugger the union, bugger everybody,  I'm a professor and I gotta profess like Gene Kelly's gotta dance.  


Sigh.  I can see that all this "unpaid time off" is going to mean a LOT of extra work.

In happier news, I am making nice progress on my article and my crocheting project and made a tasty Boeuf en Daube for dinner tonight.

 Possibly the only person who will really like this is mundungus42 . But what the heck.  This is a silly parody of a revenge tragedy I wrote years ago.  Five acts, iambic pentameter, took only 20 minutes to perform including all the murders.

It's probably more fun for readers to pick out all the literary references and pop culture allusions, but there are a few specific in-jokes that need explaining.  

This was originally written for the Graduate Student Follies at the English Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hence the Madison jokes.  

Lacan, Freud, De Saussure:  Theorists beloved of postmodern literary critics.  

Tillyard: EMW Tillyard, author of The Elizabethan World Picture, an Old Historicist book now largely discredited and particularly scorned by postmodernists.  Saying that a historical reading of a text is like Tillyard is a total dismissal, suggesting that the writer hasn't read anything past about 1950.

Areas One, Two and Three:  In the UW graduate English program, correspond to Medieval, Renaissance, and 18th century studies.

St. Helen C.:  Helen C. White, a former chair of the English department who ruled it with a mostly benevolent iron fist for decades.  The current building housing the English department is named after her; a portrait of her hangs in the Faculty Lounge.

Bagel Hour:  Grad student social event on Fridays; largely self-explanatory.

"Colloquium":  The Renaissance graduate students at that time sponsored a "Renaissance Colloquium," a brown bag lunch discussing a paper or theory.  

Pizza:  The Renaissance faculty also ran a program called "Shakespeare with Pepperoni,"  evenings devoted to watching Shakespeare films on video with pizza.  There were bitter fights over who supplied the pizza:  a senior faculty member was particularly attached to the pizza at Pizza Pit ("all my coupons are from there.")  Another faculty member pointed out, correctly, that said pizza arrived coated with a solid grease slick.  Seniority being what it is, Pizza Pit continued to supply Shakespeare with Pepperoni; for all I know, it still does. 

Happy New Moon, everybody!

Yes, I'll be finishing the essays I was writing. The guilt about not doing my "real" work has been building up, so that will come first. But, in the meantime, for all you werewolf enthusiasts and especially anyone who's seen my werewolf talks, here's a few trailers on upcoming wolfy movies!

The Wolf Man, with Benecio del Toro, coming out next year. Alas, in the few hours since I put this up, they've removed it due to copyright restrictions. But you can see the trailer here. Normally, I have a hard time watching werewolf movies, ironically, because I am easily scared, but this looks so awesomely Victorian and atmospheric that I may down some hootch to calm myself down, buy a box of Depends, and go. In all seriousness, it looks gorgeous, and it gets extra points for actually using the names from the first movie (Lawrence Talbot) and the poem:

Even a man who is pure of heart
And says his prayers by night
May become a wolf, when the wolfsbane blooms,
And the autumn moon is bright.

(Web site here.) Additional points for adding creepy Victorian insane asylum techniques.  [EDIT:  The Scotland Yard Inspector is named Aberline.  AHA.  He was the detective inspector on the Jack the Ripper case, so there will also probably be a Ripper connection.  Bring EXTRA Depends.]

You'll also probably notice the leg shape and the way the eye changes. In werewolf stuff, if the eye stays the same, it's a signal that the person is still the same inside (because the eye is the window to the soul.) If it changes, the person inside has become a monster, and there is no reaching him. For me, that's the real underlying scare of werewolf literature and movies: the idea that something could turn a nice human being into a monster, and that this could happen to someone you love, or to you. Lupin belongs to this type of werewolf, sometimes called "the reluctant monster.

And just for larfs, the upcoming *Twilight* werewolf movie, *New Moon.*




Yeah, yeah, I know I rip on *Twilight* a bit, but the last movie was considerably better than the book. One problem with the books is they are so flabby.  I walk out of *Harry Potter* movies thinking, "too bad they left that out," or even, "I really, really wish they hadn't left that out."  With *Twilight,* I thought, "Oh, thank God, they left that out."  Anyhoo, I'll be going to see it.

With all of these wolfy movies, maybe I'll propose something with wolfy clips at *Infinitus.*  Who knows?

Completely unrelated to the *Twilight* posts.

People are bummed, including me --a bit--and nothing cheers me up like my kitties, especially since I read that the cat Snootch is modeled on in Two Lumps died this week. (BTW, if you haven't read *Two Lumps*, do--it's hilarious, plus they promised to keep drawing Snootch.)  Plus I was admiring alabastard and alabastardragon 's kitty pix. Then I saw pennswoods ' posting about her Molly Weasely sweater and here's the results.

I do crochet a bit, though it's been a long time, and I thought I would see what kinds of yarn I already had. While I was pulling stuff out, I noticed my first unsuccessful Harry Potter crocheting project: a Slytherin scarf that didn't quite work out. It's sort of twice the width at the bottom than it is at the top, and there wasn't anything to be done with it. What could I use it for?

Clearly, it is a Great Thing For Cats to lie on!

( Cat pictures with CRAFTS! )

Anyway, hope you all enjoyed that.

 Once again, I'm not aiming at anyone or anything except the books.  Meyer may come in for some collateral damage, though I'm really trying not to.

To continue.  Let's assume that there are Great Books, and that one of the markers of a Great Book is the ability to read it on several different levels.  The "bottom" level is usually the story itself.  Does it work as a novel (or play, or poem)?  Because if it does not, I don't think you can erect much of a critical structure on it.  You can, as I've said, read the book for other reasons:  escapism, cultural studies, or masochism leap to mind.  

The Twilight books are novels, and there are certain things a reader expects from a novel:  plot, genre, conflict, character development, and good use of language, to name a few.  Let's be generous and stipulate that a book doesn't have to succeed in every way to be acceptable on this lowest level.  PG Wodehouse novels, for example, aren't known for their deep social criticism, but the prose style is brilliant, the plots are constructed with a watchmaker's precision, and they're also quite funny.  Wodehouse also made no claim to writing Great Books:  he called them "musical comedies without music."  But a novel ought to succeed in at least a few of these areas.  Twilight really doesn't.

Most of these points overlap and tangle together, so forgive me in advance for any incoherence.

( Plot, genre, and character )
Since this is becoming quite long, I will end here.  Next I'll be talking about prose style, references and allusions to other books, and some of the special difficulties with Book Four, Breaking Dawn.