Fine, fine

I'm being accused of being a bad blogger by Rhianon, so here's me making up for it. It this maybe the reason that my RSS feeds aren't functioning properly? Maybe blogs are like that running shoe TV thing that they have for kids--you don't get what you don't give.

Since the Dr. Dog concert, I've been back in a "in the library at all possible hours" groove. Even today, Good Friday (good because it's a day off?), I spent a good six hours at Robarts. Lame, I know. I would rather have been making Nigella's homemade hot cross buns, but I don't have time for that; although, I've vowed to myself that I'll find the time to try this bread recipe. The chemistry is fascinating! But really, hot cross buns are just an excuse to eat too much butter, so it's probably a good idea that I didn't have the chance to get my bake on.

My modernist poetry prof falls somewhere between a genius and pure evil, and so in order to get anywhere in her class, I've got to really push myself. I decided that maybe doing so much brainstorming and writing on the computer wasn't doing me as much good as I thought it was. There's something about the wiring of my brain that makes a pen and paper a really valuable tool in terms of getting my brain to slow down and think hard. Probably because my brain and my hands work at about the same speed when I'm typing, which means that there isn't much processing or filtering going on when I'm typing things out. Writing things out by hand forces me to process more slowly and completely, and I'm processing both visually and kinesthetically. So, I picked me up a few big Moleskines, and away I went. I think it's working. I've got a solid mental sense of the presentation that I'm giving for O Evil Genius One's class, which I now need to write out fully, and I think I've really hit on something for a conference paper I'm writing about In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient. I still need to immerse myself in both Bakhtin and Kristeva's theory of the carnivalesque, but I have a good general grasp of it. I don't have to present the paper until May 2 anyway, so I'm not too stressed about it yet.

I'm also working on some ideas for my public intellectuals paper. I'm thinking that I could do a really interesting paper on Richard Florida's move to Toronto; the class is specifically on American public intellectuals, but he happens to be an American who now lives in T.O., so I think it would be a valid topic. I'm just not sure how willing our prof would be to let me write on someone who isn't on the syllabus. I'll see. Florida has lived here since late 2007, and as he and his wife settle in to the city, I'm reading more and more about how he as a public intellectual is applying his theories about cities and the people who live in them to Toronto. I'd love to look at how his theories and his specific comments about Toronto could be implemented in terms of policy changes at City Hall; it doesn't sound much like an English paper (it sounds more like an urban studies or poli-sci paper), but it's a fairly interdisciplinary course.

Today was the first of two Easter dinners, and now I need to go lapse into a scalloped-potato and ham coma so that I can get up and get more work done tomorrow. It would help if I could actually get some work done on the paper that I've still got due from last term. That sounds bad. It's not, but still. It's gotta be done. I can't wait for July when I'll be done all but one course and I can take a breather.