Repetitive things usually annoy me: repetitive motions like finger-tapping, repetitive sounds, even spoken choruses in songs when the rhythm of speech fights the beat. (That’s not repetitive, exactly, I guess, but it bothers me in the same way.) One of the things I thought was most charming about WALL-E, though, was the way the animators lingered on the little repetitive motions their characters made — how the characters were given time to be entranced with the movements of their stubby hands or with the lighting of an old Zippo. It’s sort of babylike, sort of animal, that kind of fascination; I’ve seen my cat do the same thing.

Before the movie — which we saw at the Alamo Drafthouse in south Austin — we sat through a number of Pixar shorts, all of which I profoundly disliked. T. kept looking over at me and laughing because I looked miserable. This was mostly because I really hate slapstick, whether cartoon or live-action. I was the sort of kid who watched the first Home Alone movie through my fingers not because I was scared for tiny Macaulay Culkin but because I felt awful for the crooks he was knocking around. But also I think I disliked the shorts because they don’t have those graceful little moments of discovery. They’re designed for visual gags and broad, predictable humor. And transparent cuteness. WALL-E included some visual gags and predictable humor and transparent cuteness, too, but that wasn’t the whole joke. It wasn’t a joke. It was a good movie.

This will probably be a recurring feature, because… yes.

• The scuzzy salmon-pink Chucks Robert De Niro wore in Great Expectations.
• Knopf rejection sheets for works by Joyce Carol Oates, V.S. Naipaul, Italo Calvino, Salman Rushdie.
• David Mamet’s (extremely detailed) baby book, complete with report cards from pre-school–apparently he handled scissors very safely.
• Houdini’s collection of magic-related manuscript materials.
• Ms. for a minor Beckett work, which I needed to measure in order to answer a patron’s query.
• A rather accomplished landscape sketch by Charlotte Brontë, with a title written in by her mother.
• Publicity photographs of a famous blackface performer, in and out of costume and paint.
• Ink on paper self-portrait by Henry Miller. T. was disappointed to learn that the self-portrait was not at all pornographic.
• A small model concept car designed by Norman Bel Geddes that looks far more like a spaceship than like an automobile.

Not much to report otherwise; I’m studying French like a fiend, doing dissertation-related reading, and working up grant proposals for an exciting new digital humanities project in our department. More on that once we have a good demo up, I hope.

A brief list.

1. The CHOP chemo regimen, which has put my father’s cancer in remission, at least temporarily.
2. Paprika — T. and I saw it twice when we were in Portland.
3. Strawberry freezer jam with chevre on a toasted English muffin.
4. GoodReads: still addictive.
5. Pigma Micron pens by Sakura, to which T. introduced me last year. They’re the best ever for marking up books.
6. The fact that Nabokov finished the ms. of Lolita only a few miles from my current location. That house is gone now, replaced with some truly ugly new construction, but there’s a plaque to mark the spot — along with a tiny Japanese maple. I’m not sure what kind of symbolic message that little tree is supposed to send.
7. The area between, say, Division and Belmont in eastern Portland. Even though the Side Street bar near Belmont got rid of its Galaga arcade machine since last summer. Tragedy!
8. The Defoe Review project (based on the HRC’s editions of the periodical).
9. Swagat’s chicken makhani.

For those of you who don’t visit my del.icio.us page:

• The origin of the Etruscan people discovered (in the Guardian)
  
• A weird, interesting little sf music video done by Hayao Miyazaki
• A used bookstore that’s also a nonprofit devoted to improving literacy
• What would likely happen to the earth if people vanished
• A road map to street food in NYC

There’s a particular pleasure in reading an articulately written and deeply negative review of something you also despise.

For example, Momus reviews Pan’s Labyrinth:

I thought it was a terrible film, deeply impoverished both in imagination and in its moral vision, stale to the core, and brutal to boot. It actually saddens and infuriates me that this kind of thing is what passes for fantasy, humanity and imagination, and that no single critic, apparently, took the film to task for its great failings, which I’ll number here, as I see them …

YES. Gah.

I’m going to have to create a tag just for New York Times reviews that use some variation on the concept of “transcending genre” when discussing works with fantastical, science fictional, or speculative content.

This time, Caryn James lauds P. D. James’s Children of Men in the following terms:

“The Children of Men” is not another of Ms. James’s famed detective novels, and it is not, as it has sometimes sloppily been described, science fiction. It is a trenchant analysis of politics and power that speaks urgently to this social moment, a 14-year-old work that remains surprisingly pertinent. Mr. Cuarón and Mr. Owen have made a film that works superbly apart from the book, but Ms. James’s extraordinary novel deserves to be rediscovered on its own.

In both forms “Children of Men,” which opened Monday, is a story of redemption, set in England just decades in the future (the film takes place in 2027), when women have inexplicably lost the ability to become pregnant. Utterly cynical, Theo (Mr. Owen) is drawn into a group trying to protect a woman who has, just as inexplicably, become pregnant and whose child is likely to be used for the despotic government’s own purposes.

Er, which elements of the book are not recognizably science fictional? The dystopian future setting? The fact that the dystopia takes place “just decades” from now? The “inexplicably” lost fertility of the human race, or the “just as inexplicably” regained fertility of one woman? It must be the fact that the book is “a trenchant analysis of politics and power that speaks urgently to this social moment.” Surely no SF could claim that kind of insight. GAG.

I ended up seeing The Prestige last weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. (No spoilers here, just general comments.) It’s a big movie in some ways, grandiose, and still not quite as good as Memento — it’s not as sharp or strange or haunting, less disturbingly possible — but mean, tight, and clever. It mostly made up for the awfulness of Batman Begins.

I’ve seen some comments about the movie feeling hollow, or failing to earn its emotional resolution. If someone could point out to me what emotional resolution Nolan was trying to earn, I’d be intrigued. It’s a story about life-warping obsession; it’s hollow for a reason.

I wanted one more turn in the story, though. Or, rather, I wanted the movie itself to pull a final sly trick on me, something I’d only realize later. Did anybody else want that, too?

My life-warping obsession, these days, is the eighteenth century. Here’s what I’m working on now:

1. Charlotte Charke project.
2. Project for Lit. of Maritime Empire class — possibly Henry Neville, possibly Samuel Foote?
3. Teaching, as always. Lots of essays coming in tomorrow morning.
4. Label for small class-designed exhibit in the HRC: ellipses in Evelina.
5. Kelly Link’s upcoming reading! (November 6, 7:30 pm, the Joynes Reading Room at UT. More details very soon.) Wheee.
6. C18 interest group for the department? First idea: reading Clarissa in real time.

I’m writing this post from the courtyard in between the HRC and the English buildings, via the HRC’s wireless connection. Oddly enough, there’s no reliable wireless in the English building. This courtyard is one of my favorite places to sit on campus, though, so I don’t mind.

It’s been a crazy week. I had a presentation Monday, a class observation Tuesday, and a short paper due today, and I feel drowsy and slow. I’m looking forward to a relatively restful weekend full of sushi, reading for my paper project on Charlotte Charke and grading some short assignments — probably with my apartment windows open, as it’s finally cooled off. Perhaps we’ll go see a movie. Any opinions to offer on The Science of Sleep, The Prestige, or Marie Antoinette?

A view from Cape Perpetua

Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

This is the view from the rock shelter built by the CCC atop Cape Perpetua, near Yachats, on the coast. We sat and read here for an hour or so, after walking up to it. (Other photos of the Eugene trip are up at flickr; I tried to post links here before I left for Portland, but dreamhost was having something of a conniption fit.)

Things we did in Portland:

–Went to the main Powell’s four times in four days, plus visits to the technical books store, the cookbook store, and the Hawthorne branch. My stack of books is taller than T.’s. Damn the c18 history section and its collection of Boswell- and Johnson-related items.

–Walked a lot, including a long trek around the west hills after missing the turn-off for the Japanese garden. Note to self: look at the map.

–Ate lots of good cheap food: the lunch buffet at Swagat on NW 21st; sushi happy hour at the Dragonfish bar; pizza and crepes and beer around Hawthorne; and a five-course lunch at the Western Culinary Institute’s Bleu, which is formal dining, but staffed by charming culinary students who function at varying levels of formality. Some of the dishes were only good; most of them were spectacular. The vanilla pot de créme with pink peppercorn flavoring was the best.

–Ogled neighborhoods: we liked the older brick apartments around Northwest near Macleay Park, but Hawthorne has a lively warm scruffiness that I liked more than the upscale blah-ness of 23rd St.

–Walked around the Reed campus, which is pretty and congenial.

–Saw A Scanner Darkly. I can’t remember the last time I was so bored during a movie.

I have no pictures from Portland, though I had my camera with me — I forgot to haul it out. Maybe I’ll take a picture of my stack of Powell’s loot — as it towers over T.’s, mwahahaha.

I wish I had something to add to the current spate of debate about cultural appropriation — or, rather, I wish I had time to add something to the debate. This is the kind of issue that requires long periods of brow-furrowing thought before posting, however, and I’m using up all my brow-furrowing time this week on challenging packing issues like whether I should keep all my cd cases and where I’m possibly going to jam in that giant comforter. Regardless of whether you have time to contribute to the discussion or not, though, I recommend checking out the links listed here (and a more recent post here that isn’t included in that list) — and if you’re interested in academic explorations of the same issue, the list of theorists referenced in Oyceter’s entry.

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Via Maud Newton: excerpts from letters by Edmund Wilson, Elena Wilson and Mary McCarthy about Lolita in manuscript.

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New winner for dvd with best deleted scenes EVER: Everything Is Illuminated.

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I’m putting my worldly goods into storage this week and going to Oregon for the summer, so I’ll apologize in advance if this blog lies fallow until next Thursday or so. I’ll be back and posting soon.