Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Qué desperdicio

I had a few things planned for posting that might have been funny, but simply too tired and faded to get to them today. Mayhapso another day.

Been rockin' the books on CD lately. First I listened to Master And Commander, and now I'm nearly finished with Frankenstein. Both are books I've read before, both excellent candidates for audial enjoyment because of the rich, poetic language and the strong scene-setting. Listening to book being read helps make the characters and setting closer and more understandable. And boy, does it make the long commute to State School more palatable.

I bought a lot of CDs and some graphic novels. (Half Price Books is my bugbear.) Preacher, Lucifer, Hellblazer... Say! I see a pattern! I'll document the TPB details another day, as part of my ongoing pledge. (And doesn't that make you want to never visit again?)

I watched a little of my Netflix picks (pics?): the BBC production of Pride And Prejudice. Oh, I can roll with the highbrow shit too.

Did nothing toward my Reading II final essay. Nothing!

Finished the David Foster Wallace essay collection. He's a fairly clever guy (although some of the things he writes about make him out to be astonishingly naive in some ways), but by the end I wish Hemingway would have come along and smacked him one. Papa would have knocked those footnotes right out of the smug, pasty bastard. Seriously --- Wallace puts footnotes in his footnotes! A couple of times he put two footnotes on the same word! Several of the footnotes were over two pages of small-font type! That's not a cute postmodern affectation. That's just lazy writing. The point at which the story no longer in any way applies to the phrase to which it's appended by a superscript number --- that's the point at which it's no longer a footnote. If you must tell such a lengthy story (and they are good stories, after all), just find a way to insert it into the main body of text.

Okay, that's about done it.

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