Heroes: Great episode. It gave Ted a new companion and created a team out of a few disgruntled types. I just rewatched the Kelly Macdonald (aka: hot schoolgirl from Trainspotting; reporter in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, etc.) episode of Alias (season 4), and so the Peter and Isaac confrontation-resolution reminds me of that. Watch it and you’ll know what I mean, not that the context is the same. It’s a common trope in any two-person fight that tangentially involves a third person.
Baking: I made banana bread a few days ago and took the remaining loaf in with me today; it did its usual disappearing trick. I had been a bit worried because I think that was the load that started to experience a weird separation effect in the butter + eggs + sugar + buttermilk + bananas mixture; I figured that perhaps the bananas were too ripe and reacting curiously. The bread was fine, however.
Teaching: A good discussion day. Their essays are due Wednesday. Today I told them about Rosenmontag and we also read “Das Fenster-Theater” together and talked about it and related topics. After class I answered questions about narratology and periodization for Natallia; she’s also taking Venkat’s 221, which is the intro to literature, and they had to read Kafka’s “Die Verwandlung” (“The Metamorphosis”).
Books: I stopped by the library and picked up Jennifer Egan’s The Keep, which got good reviews last summer. She evidently developed a reputation as a chick lit author, which is, as one can imagine, a bit of a bad thing, for it’s a ghetto, and an ill-defined one at that. What are the boundaries of chick-lit? Who knows. It’s the same reason why Margaret Atwood does not like being called a sci-fi author even though half of her most well-known books are related to sci-fi, especially that of the post-apocalyptic dystopian variety. Once you’re placed in a genre-confine, you stay there, and chick-lit is merely the newest such genre. And yet I still use the word. I also picked up the Nicola Griffith edited Bending the Landscape: Horror (New York: Overlood Press, 2001), which I had checked out once before, but back then I only read the first story (“Coyote Love”), which turned my stomach with its blunt but not overly graphic depiction of self-muitilation. I need to read the rest. I also got A Word Like Fire by Dick Barnes (New York: Handsel, 2005), a posthumous poetry anthology by a Pomona English professor whom I knew only in passing while I was there. I saw his bizarre play “The Death of Buster Quinine” my freshman year and seeing the trailer to Julie Taymor’s “Across the Universe” reminded me of it. There is no information out there to be found. I was surprised that the UW-Madison library had the book on the shelf.
Coffee: After the library I stopped by Fair Trade and had a fritter and coffee, the former being a splurge given my need to lose weight, but I hadn’t eaten all day and needed sugar for my brain. That’s my rationalization, and Angela’s. Turns out she was there as well. It’s not a German department hang-out, per se, but quite a few of us show up there. I’ve seen Kris there, and Helena, and Mike as well, and I went there with Corina, her sister, and Juergen once. I wrote another diary and had Angela listen to the “Treuetest” from a Hamburg radio station. The guy has the radio call his girlfriend at work to see if she’s faithful by having the radio guy ask her out. It gets worse. It’s not that she says yes, it’s that she says “Sure, but it will cost you 250 Euros.” The girlfriend moonlights in a way the boyfriend did not suspect or expect, and she tears him a new one asking, “How do you think you got your BMW? How do we afford vacations to Mallorca?”
Music: I’m still in the middle (tail end?) of Joe Satriani. The first album to which I listened (Engines of Creation, and perhaps Flying in a Blue Dream) was amazing. The guitar is always good, but the overall quality of the music depends on the genre or style a bit, and the plain guitar rock is the least satisfying musically. After Joe Satriani come the Johns: Coltrane, Denver, and Mellencamp.
Tonight: I’m finishing up a bottle of Smoking Loon syrah (2004). I think of it as a pleasant wine to watch Heroes to, to read to, and to write to. I got some more comics today but haven’t read any. And so many library books. And a dissertation. I spoke with Sabine a bit and she asked if I wanted to be in the play this spring; I said yes, but told her of a weekend I’ll be gone, a week and a half before the performances. I have last night’s episode of Battlestar Galactica to watch.
