First off, can I say: Annie, your week in Miami sounded AMAZING. Look at you, hob-nobbing with the art scene, getting into fancy hotel bars. I was just watching an episode of 30 Rock a couple of hours ago (when I decided to take a "break" from my paper-writing), and Alex Baldwin's character had the most amazing line: "Why does anyone go to Miami? Ass, and the burgeoning art scene."
Classic.
My friend Diana was in town this weekend, and we spent yesterday at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which is now my favorite museum in Boston. Granted, I've now only been to two, but details, details.
Perhaps the best-known piece in the collection is a painting called "El Jaleo" by John Singer Sargent, who is actually one of my father's favorite painters. It's actually a saucy Flamenco dancer doing her thing, and I wonder whether she's getting it on with one of the guitarristas in the background.
Anyway, that was about the only artsy thing accomplished this weekend. Diana took me to Target, where I spent $75 worth of I-don't-know-what. Toilet paper. Face lotion. Clorox. And then she took me to the Super 88 to buy kimchi (I bought 3 lb jar of the stuff--I am now lost without it). I balked at the rice prices, though, so knowing me, I will probably lug a 10lb bag of it on the boltbus with me.
I have 2 10-15p academic papers due by the end of this week, and--fingers crossed--I have good feelings about them. One paper is on Jane Eyre and its 2 conflicting narrative voices, and some bit about Feminism and the Bildungsroman (aka the novel of development). THe other is on Mansfield Park, exploring why Fanny Price is a pain in the ass. Or, to put it more politely, the anti-heroine, if you will. I've got my friend Tim reading over a draft of the former (he, apparently, loves the Bildungsroman--blasted British M.A.'s!), and I am 8 of 10 pages done with the Mansfield Park paper, plus revisions and edits. So, if all goes well, I should be able to take part in 10 cent buffalo wings with my running group tomorrow evening, and a couple of holiday parties slated for the following weekend. I'm almost too afraid to go back to NY early because all of my mechanized rituals--library, gym, library, home for dinner, library--will all go out of wack the second I touch down from the bus. What if I sit around on the couch all day watching Food Network, getting fat and not writing? It's like, all of the hard work I've been doing in Boston will get cancelled out by a two-week sojourn in NYC. But yet, I miss all of you guys...
In other news: my short story for (my tyrant professor) Leslie's class went over not so hotly. Well, actually, he was a lot nicer about couching his criticisms than he usually is. Here is a snippet of his typed, written feedback to my story:
"Patty, this is a difficult piece to judge because it is clearly--or at any rate clear to me--not a short story, but a piece of something you seemed not to have the time to complete; nor does it really have a steady focus... I think I can sum it up under the rubric of IMPRECISION: NOT JUST IMPRECISION OF LANGUAGE, THOUGH THAT IS RIFE, BUT IMPRECISION OF THOUGHT AND PURPOSE AS WELL." (Note--these are Leslie's ALL-CAPS)
He wraps up with: "The trouble is you don't string either [scenes or dialogue] onto the thread of a plot. They are jewels that never become a necklace, and at the very end, to extend this awkward metaphor, they all tumble with the non-ending over the floor."
He did say that he was "proud" of me for "rallying back" after my "initial disappointment" in the class, i.e., after I was a crybaby.
Well, that will be the last of the ego-blowing moments for 2008. Leslie's on sabbatical next semester, so who knows how things will end up.
-P
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