http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/the-two-languages-of-academic-freedom/?em

I have thoughts, but not enough time to put them together right now. Brilliant look at the current state of academia, though.

So, unlike of_polyhymnia and beautiful_rain_, I'm going to go right ahead and be maudlin. The reason I'm posting this poem (by James Hay Jr.) is because of what, exactly, it says about me. At the convocation ceremony, our first day at UVA, they put a little card with this poem on it on every single chair. I don't still have mine, largely because I thought that the poem was ( Read more... )

Yay...I bought a dress for graduation today, with total dress-fu. I bought the third dress I tried on, because it was perfect. It's all white and blue and sundress-y. That is skill. (Now I need shoes. *cross fingers and hopes for shoe-fu ( Read more... )

The more I work on this thesis, the more I realize how much I don't know. I don't know theory, flat out- I haven't read Foucault, or Lacan, or Bakhtin. (I have read Judith Butler; I guess that counts.) I don't know how to consolidate theory into my own viewpoints once I have it. I can analyze a text just fine - oh look! it's enjambment! - but I ( Read more... )

Well, it's been quite a weekend of exciting extremes. When things were good they were very very good..and so forth. My grandparents were in a car accident Thursday night- my grandfather's still in the hospital but with a fairly positive prognosis; my grandmother is fine, just bruised, and is apparently currently living in my bedroom at home. I ( Read more... )

Once upon a time, a few short months ago, I was completely obsessed with Buffy. Back in those days, I saw everything through the lens of the Buffyverse: I made connections with my coursework, saw aspects of Buffy in other movies I watched and books I read, dreamed up plots for complicated Buffy fanfics that I'll never write. This was, notably, ( Read more... )

Well, classes are already rocking my world. Everything's just so awesome- I'm only taking three classes; along with the credits for my thesis and orchestra, it turns out to be a full course load, and maybe even a heavy one, given how hard the Paradise Lost class is going to be for me. I don't get Renaissance and Restoration poetry the way I get ( Read more... )

Classes started today, but I didn't have any, so instead I read lots of thesis-related stuff and went to the gym. Aside from that, a lot of happy stuff happened. I would write a post, instead of bullet form, but I have stuff left to do and I really need to go to bed early, because I have a 9:30 class tomorrow, which is by far the earliest class I ( Read more... )

Well, I feel surprisingly validated in thinking that Sweeney Todd was the best movie I've seen this year, now that it and Atonement - which I also saw last night - won the Golden Globes. I still haven't written my review of Sweeney Todd, despite having spent the last three weeks since I've seen it listening to nothing but the soundtrack while ( Read more... )

Happy New Year, all! It's 2008, which means that after four years of "Class of 2008" sounding distant and meaningless, I actually have the end of college coming up. Yipes ( Read more... )